On and Off

  America is run by technology... and to really understand this, you should see it from the point of view of an outsider - preferably someone from a third world country.
At my home, everyday, I would wake up to see my mother (who always wakes up an hour ahead of me) boiling water and then carrying the very hot tumbler to her bathroom. We didn't have a geyser and it was her way of having a hot bath in the morning. It wasn't that we were poor (we weren't rich but could definitely have afforded a heater if we wanted to) but it was that it seemed like an unnecessary luxury in tropical Kerala to take hot water baths; let alone have a current consuming device to heat water. But then, for some inexplicable reason, for the past few years the mornings have been very chilly (blame it on global warming) and my mom's arthritis did not help things much.
 Every home here has hot water. You turn the knob this way and you get hot water, the other way is cold water. The difference comes only in the accuracy with which you can tune the knob to give the temperature of your preference. Better homes have better knobs, poor homes have poor knobs. In fact in three weeks this has become so common to me that I feel stupid just mentioning it. Does anybody share my wonder? I guess if you were the kind to feel dazzled by just hot water, then you wouldn't be reading this in the first place - internet is more common that hot water. Correction: high speed internet is more common than hot water!
 The second thing that immediately struck me was that expect for lights there are no on/off switches anywhere.
To indians: Remember how we usually have a whole switch board occupying a sizable fraction of the wall with switches that you could on or off ?
To Americans: switches ( not the nipple kind of things that you have jutting out of the walls here but ..oh! how do you explain it? look up in the net..) are things that are used to close electric circuits.
  The difference is that I even had switches for the power sockets at home. Here you can plug something into a power socket and from an Indian point of view (!) it is always on. you simply turn the TV on/off or the microwave on/off. But if you put a fork into the socket, you'll definitely get a shock. In india, i would switch off the socket itself. Sounds weird? It does to me too...
This makes a lot of sense .. why waste wall space with unnecessary switches and switchboards? Things like TVs and DVD players come with their own on/off switches, what difference does it make to add another layer of protection to this? I remember that when my neighbours' house burned down, the fire started from a short circuit inside a switchboard.

Wouldn't have happened in America, heh?