water crisis :dry delhi summers

This is one interesting incident that i have gone through in recent times . It is a generally accepted fact that the harbinger of delhi summers brings with it an acute water crisis.This past week was almost desert-like in my house with not a drop of water to drink or bathe.Due to the same old prejudice in my mind - i said to myself -sid guy , the days have begun where you have to dig deep for each drop of water .So for drinking i had water cans or the community water outlet and each time i had to go down 3 floors and get some water and for bathing i had to go to a friend's house nearby - now u could imagine how irritating it was .

But then i was a fool to not take any cue from nature and the surroundings .Realisation should have dawned that it was a bit too early for such acute water shortage and i should have asked my neighbours at the same floor ( floor matters because my motor is placed on the 2nd floor and it could be that the natural flow did not get the water to this height for the motor to pump and maybe the guys having a motor placed on the ground floor would be having water just because the pump was accessing it), but i never did any of this and just assumed that because it was summer on our heads that there was not water and was complying with it . On top of that the newspapers continually said that the whole of delhi was facing the water crisis, so everything just seemed to be even more normal and expected.

Then one fine day , my motor co-sharer came by as a godsend and stimulated my biased brain .Let me just explain to you the whole situation: we have a common overhead tank which is on my terrace and both off us share that tank , and the motor has 2 energisation points : one with him and the other with me , so on manual changeover we can control the running of the motor. It so happens that the chap has such job timings that at both times of the day he cannot somehow get the supply water for his use and so has to bear with the tank stored water .At my place i run the motor at both times , but these days since my conductor going in to the motor was open i was not being able to access the motor and about which i did not come to know because the motor was in his house , and hence i concluded that there was no water inflow from the water board's side , but i was grossly wrong .Today i happened to go to his house and serendpitously discover that the motor was not running through my switch , so i came home straightaway and checked the continuity of my conductor and saw that either both wires ( P and N ) were glowing on a line tester or both were not glowing ,the other chap said that " bhai there is a short circuit" , i said cmon how can it be a short circuit , if it is a short circuit both would glow on any combination you apply .Is is a open on the N wire and i was exactly right - for an open circuit if the open N is connected to the supply side P both would not glow and if open N was connected to supply N both would glow : because the whole of the P voltage would come over to the N wire because of no voltage drop.So after about 15 mts of haggling with the wires we discovered that there was an open right next to the plug point in my house and we then cleard that fault .

And AHOY!!!! we could get abundant water from tomorrow onwards.

MORAL : MURPHY'S law is ubiquitous and is always working , here in india systems are always on the verge of instabilty and hence there are many possible ways of it going wrong , though for it to be all picture perfect there is only one way , so rather than thinking and assuming too much , it is always better to start checking your immediate surroundings for the looming MURPHY resultant .