Blackout

Suffered a 6-hour blackout yesterday.. from 2pm to 8pm.. Unbelievable..

Please bear in mind that I don't live deep in the jungles nor am I hours away from the nearest town.. My house is just 5-min away from the town center of the 2nd largest city in the state!!! Things that I thought could only happen in third-world countries is happening in a country that wants to achieve "developed country" status by 2020, whose PM just made an announcement to the whole world that he wants to achieve 5% GDP growth next year..

It is not that I am unwilling to write good things about my own country, but seriously, I can't find anything to boast about!! Even the most basic thing like ensuring constant and reliable electricity supply can't be met, what other grand projects do the government want to boast about?? They can't even get the basic infrastructure in place.. Flooding in lowland areas is a yearly or even bi-yearly occurrence, with landslides and collapsing buildings making headlines every other month..

Sometimes Most of the time, I don't feel proud to be a citizen of this country, not with a government that only knows how to polarize its people and discriminate against its minorities, politicians who only wanna grab as much money (from the people) as possible before they get toppled, security forces who are only interested in getting "pocket-money" from the public that they are supposed to protect, public servants who don't know that they are supposed to SERVE the people and not the other way round and many more absurdities.. Add to the fact that our international reputation isn't that great either, as our ministers/politicians like to either stick their foot in their mouth or to antagonize other countries by taking a "holier-than-thou" attitude without looking at ourselves first..

I had 2 translation jobs to rush over the weekend.. I had completed one of them in the morning and was going to start on the other one when the blackout happened.. By the time I finished the 2nd job and send it out, it was almost 2am..

Anyway, one good thing that came out of this blackout episode was that I managed to read 2 books before the sun set around 7pm.. :) I had to do something to kill time, and so I hit the books.. One was Jeffery Deaver's The Empty Chair and the other was 大崎善生's 別れの後の静かな午後 which was translated into Chinese 《分手后的宁静午后》by 王蕴洁. It was great to be able to just read without the temptation/disruption of the Internet.. :p