Last evening, as the sun went towards the horizon, I went out for a walk. The streetlights flickered on, casting their cold, harsh blue glow onto my face, while the sky was still scarlet-yellow. The clash of colours didn’t particularly appeal to me, but it stirred a thought.

A few minutes back, I had passed a house with two to four small diyas (earthen lamps) glowing gently outside its front door. You rarely see people lighting lamps outside their homes these days. Was it Deepavali? It couldn’t be. Maybe it was Thrikarthika. Nonetheless, the sight made me pause.

Just a hundred years ago, those small oil lamps might have been the only light piercing the night on streets. Their warm glow would barely illuminate what stood close by. Moreover, lighting even a single small lamp took effort, time and money. To them, thinking about lighting an entire street would have seemed absurd. Who could afford to burn so much oil? Who would even consider doing it when lighting just a few rooms inside a house was already a luxury?

Whereas today, entire cities are bathed in light, stretching for miles, funded by taxes so small we hardly notice paying them. What was once unimaginable has become something so ordinary, common and effortless that we don’t even consider turning on a light as the sun goes down as anything more than utilitarian. It made me wonder how much we live surrounded by abundance without realising it.

Thinking about those tiny oil lamps also made me strangely optimistic about what the next hundred years might bring. Something so absurd for us to even think about it will in a hundred years be so ubiquitous that nobody even thinks about it when the sun goes down.