In the city, there were two ways to get electricity.

One was the government’s: official, clunky, always breaking down, but built on the dim hope of something better someday.

The other was the people’s: a tangle of stolen wires, hooks, and half-baked cleverness that kept the lights flickering just long enough to fool everyone into thinking it was progress.

The government called the people’s way theft. The people called it smart.

With an average IQ hovering around 80, the folks in the lanes figured they were outwitting the system. Hook a wire here, bribe a cousin there, and boom: free power. They patted themselves on the back for it, like monkeys who’d learned to smash coconuts but never thought to plant a tree.

Their homes weren’t palaces. They were slapped-together shacks of brick and regret, where fans spun on pilfered juice and TVs blared soap operas about rich people who paid their bills. Kids hunched over ancient computers, charging them off the communal cheat-line, dreaming of becoming engineers in a country where the grid looked like a spiderweb designed by drunks.

But when the transformer blew – because it always blew, overloaded by a dozen refrigerators and that one fool running a welder during peak hours – the neighborhood went dark. Everyone cursed, sweated, and waited for some nephew with more guts than sense to climb up and jury-rig it back. No safety gear, no plan, just raw nerve and a prayer that the voltage wouldn’t turn him into a cautionary tale.

This wasn’t ingenuity so much as selfishness dressed as survival. Each household thinking, “Why pay when I can steal?” Never mind that the collective thievery starved the grid of funds, kept repairs at bay, and ensured the whole mess stayed broken. They thought they were clever, these folks with their 80 IQ wisdom always cheating the organization to grab a quick win, blind to how it locked them in backwardness forever.

It was like open defecation, that other grand Indian tradition. Foreigners wrinkled their noses at it, but the locals shrugged: “It’s free, it’s easy, why build toilets when the field works?” Never mind the cholera, the polluted water, the kids dying from diseases that smarter societies stamped out centuries ago. They managed it with sweepers and sunrises, calling it resilient, but it was just another ruinous habit that was selfish, shortsighted, and perpetuating filth because organizing plumbing seemed too hard for minds tuned to the immediate scam.

This same cultural wisdom of fraud and grabbing what you can now was always screwing the future and bled into everything. Take the H1B visa chasers, those eager souls who signed up for America’s tech sweatshops. They’d nod at contracts promising long hours, no escapes, bosses like petty tyrants, all for a ticket out of the homeland’s heat and hooks. But to snag those visas and offshoring gigs, many whipped up fake resumes and credentials using bogus degrees from phantom universities, invented experience in coding languages they’d barely heard of, all polished with a cousin’s Photoshop skills. “Smart move,” they’d tell themselves, trading dignity for a few years in a cubicle that hummed with reliable AC. They couldn’t quit without deportation, but hey, it beat the blackouts back home. So they endured, thinking it clever, just like stealing electricity: a short-term dodge that kept them from building something lasting, either there or here. Escape artists, not innovators.

The companies getting a deal on this supposedly elite talent often ended up with fakes and actors, posers nodding through meetings, copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow, no special skills or real knowledge to speak of. Projects stalled, bugs multiplied, deadlines exploded like those neighborhood transformers. But in the culture of corruption, this was genius: win the job at any cost, individually triumph, never mind the crappy outcome. Western civilization expected results like good code, reliable systems, actual progress. Here, the scam was the success, the lie the legacy.

And that’s why, with a billion bodies milling about, India birthed no tech wonders to rival the world’s giants. No Silicon Valleys sprouting from the dust, just call centers and copycat apps. The Indian mindset favored the quick cheat over the bold build. Why invent when you can outsource your brainpower? A nation of workarounds, not breakthroughs, because true progress demands long-term vision, not just surviving the next outage or visa renewal. Creativity and innovation were for other cultures, the ones that didn’t prize conformity like a sacred cow. Risk aversion ran deep, a cultural straitjacket that whispered, “Stick to the script, copy what’s proven, don’t rock the boat or the blackout-prone grid.” They could mimic marvels from afar, reverse-engineer apps and gadgets with dutiful precision, but imagining something wholly new? That required leaping into the unknown, and leaps were for fools and dreamers. So stagnation set in, a boring dependency on foreign sparks, ensuring that despite the teeming masses, the big ideas stayed imported, like reliable electricity itself.

The reformers came, preaching billing and civic virtue. “Pay up,” they said, “and we’ll fix the grid for everyone.” The people nodded politely, then went right back to their hooks and ladders because in their low-wattage logic, a monthly bill was unbearable, but endless blackouts, exploding transformers, and kids studying by candlelight were just fine. It was the math of the dim short-term cheat over long-term build.

Politicians like Irfan Solanki got it. They didn’t fight the corruption; they fed it, doling out favors and blind eyes to keep the votes coming, steering into abundant idiocy. The real constitution wasn’t in Delhi’s laws but in bribes, kinships, and the delusion that stealing from the collective pot made you a genius.

A few people with IQs north of the national average shook their heads. They saw the tragedy in a nation capable of working with satellites and software being crippled by neighborhoods where the “systems engineers” were teenagers with pliers and no foresight. History hates the wrong fixers, sure, but these weren’t fixers. They were saboteurs, congratulating themselves while the city stayed dim.

The poor didn’t live in theories, true. They lived in heat and darkness. But they chose it, over and over, thinking their workarounds were wise. The fan spun today, but tomorrow? Another blackout, another disease from the open field, another generation stuck in the same backward loop, chasing visas instead of visions.

The miracle wasn’t that it happened. The miracle was that anyone thought it was smart. A planner saw backwardness. A politician saw votes. A child saw the tablet charging, until it didn’t.

Only the child might one day grasp the point that cheating the system cheats yourself worst of all.