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While You Were Complaining about the Olympics, 600 Million Indians Had No Power

So, 10% of the world's population is currently without electricity thanks to the world's largest blackout in one of the world's poorest countries, and some 5% is complaining that it can't watch the Olympics in HD in realtime on satellite TV. Which is...

Do you need any more confirmation that you’ve got it pretty damn good, you Twitter whiners? Here’s are a couple of today’s leading headlines: Half of India Crippled by Second Day of Power Failures + Delayed US Olympics coverage panned.

So, 10 percent of the world’s population went without electricity thanks to the world’s largest blackout in one of the world’s poorest countries, and some 5 percent is complaining that it can’t watch the Olympics in HD in realtime on satellite TV. Update: It looks like power is back on.

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Which is obviously pretty par for the course in this techno-lopsided world of ours, the one where Americans bitch on Facebook mobile about the subway running late while millions in Africa can’t get clean water. Or just lopsided; the one where Americans toss out 400 pounds of food in the trash every year while systemic food shortages wrack Africa and East Asia. Breaking news: Some people have a lot, and others have less!

But just like nobody’s really all that surprised that NBC is totally screwing up its Olympics coverage, Indians aren’t much impressed by the biggest blackout in history. According to the New York Times, "despite the scale of the power failure, many Indians responded with shrugs. In the first place, India’s grid is still being developed and does not reach into many homes. An estimated 300 million Indians have no routine access to electricity.

“Second, localized failures are routine. Diners do not even pause in conversation when the lights blink out in a restaurant. At Delhi’s enormous Safdarjung Hospital, doctors continued to rush around as hundreds of patients lay in darkened hallways. Third, so many businesses employ backup generators that, for many, life continued without much of a hiccup.”

Despite all this:

Now, you could probably pull two polarized headlines out of the Google News that demonstrate how unevenly distributed technological and social progress is across the world every day. And maybe I should do exactly that. Maybe I shouldn’t.

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But the degree to which this Olympics snafu has preoccupied our cultural conversation demonstrates a technological entitlement—we want our sports coverage live, available online, and we want it now—that rests a tad too uneasily in the spot above the fold alongside reports that 700 million people don’t even have the power to run their TVs. And that’s in India alone. This American preoccupation with ultimately frivolous matters is nothing new, obviously, but it’s striking just how many notches down the line our ‘debate’ over Olympic coverage is away from whether or not we can turn the electricity on; whether the most fundamental element to modern society is even available or not. In half of India, it hasn’t been.

But hey, at least it looks like the power has come back on. Even after all the hassle and spoiled milk, at least they’ll probably get to watch the Olympics live.

Image via Think Progress

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