Free Electricity

If you came here looking for a guide to reduce your electricity bill or to avoid paying it completely, you came to the wrong place. If you’re the kind of person who likes to be engaged in such activity, then you’re the kind of person I loathe.

Two days back, I was talking about how I once downloaded a 300MB file via HTTP on a dial-up connection using an application called Download Accelerator. The huge bill prompted my parents to switch to broadband in 2004. Ever since I started using broadband, I stopped worrying about switching my desktop computer off. Hearing this, someone asked me whether we had our electricity meter doctored so that we could prevent our electricity bills from shooting up. After having a short discussion about this, I learned that most of the people I was talking to thought they were smarter than me because their bills only showed them numbers they wanted to see. When we were having this discussion, not many people were interested in talking about the ill-effects of stealing electricity since most of them were proudly echoing their ingenious solutions to the problem of being caught in the process.

In our locality, a lot of people steal electricity openly and many of them resisted the switchover to the tamper-proof digital meters. After hearing our shouts of protest against the bias in favor of such people, BSES employees visited us and tried to convince us to keep quiet by offering to remove our digital meters. The anger intensified and BSES was forced to install digital meters everywhere.

Now I understand why some of the people I met at Freed.in think the concept of Free Software is a matter of price, and not a matter of liberty. They don’t understand that freedom is the ability to good, not a license to behave irresponsibly. It’s because of such idiotic members of our society, that people like us are running scared not knowing what to do when something wrong happens. We don’t know whom to complain to and even if we do, we don’t want to because there is a considerable amount of risk involved.