Electricity Bill

Usually I try to pay my electricity bill through the bill pay option from my bank account.It is so convenient. However I missed it this month. Madam who usually gets hyper for smaller things ( thanks to My pop in law's genes) gave me an ultimatum to pay it immediately and she could visualize the line getting disconnected by evening. Basically she gave me no choice.
I had no clue where to pay and finally my driver said that BESCOM has many franchisees where you could pay. So I went to Reddy's pharmacy on our road Only Cash the lady at the counter said firmly.I came back with a receipt which looked like a idli vada bill from Srinidhi sagar with a big smile. Madam was very apprehensive and was sure that the line getting disconnected. She said I should have gone to the BDA center and paid through cheque etc.. Fortunately so far our line has been intact and Reddy's franchise also seems to be.

This takes me back to my childhood days where paying electricity bill was an elaborate affair at home. My grandfather had an efficient system of keeping track of the electricity bills. All the bills and the receipts used to be filed on a metal hook which used to hang from the door knob in our hall. As soon as a new bill came in my grandfather will check for it's accuracy and in case of small rounding off error he used to talk on how things were absolutely prim and propah during the "angrez ka Zamana" and how it has changed post independence. Thank god he is not alive today. "Gaplas" and "Gotalas" of Rs 10 crore don't make front page news any more as the levels of corruption seem to have their own standards if they have to be front page news.

Coming back to the electricity bill payment my grand father's excitement levels used to go up in exponential proportion as the due date for the electricity bill approached. He would have talked to everybody including our milk man,maid servant, vegetable seller, fruits vendor and his friends on how he has an important assignment in the coming days - paying our electricity bill.
On the "D" day we used to leave home by 5.45 AM ( we have to be beat the queue was his solid argument) with the exact amount for the bill. ( My grandfather would have checked this at least a dozen times in the past one week).
Most of the times we weren't the first one in the queue. Another grandfather like mine would have beat us to the queue for the "mission possible".
Finally around 7.30PM we would have completed our "mission possible" with a beaming smile on my grandfather's face of having completed a big task. Post our "mission" we had hot idly and coffee at the udupi hotel which was only reason I used to accompany my grandfather.
How I wish we could go back to a time where life was not complicated and even simple tasks were taken with a lot of seriousness and responsibility and completing them was considered such a big achievement.