Massive Indian Power Outage Offers a Wider Lesson to the World

Our hearts go out to the 680 million people in northern and eastern India who are enduring that nation’s largest electric blackout ever. If that number seems too large to grasp, the recent outage has impacted a population group larger than that of the United States, Russia and Brazil combined.

That is a lot of people suffering – hotels, hospitals, restaurants, schools, rail transportation... all stopped still.

The world should take note and learn a very important lesson: we are all interdependent one to another.

Recently the President of the United States was misquoted when he correctly said that no business owner achieves success alone.

Any successful business needs lights, power, roads and healthy employees.

Often that large supportive, and very necessary, infrastructure is built and maintained by the collective effort of government, paid for with public taxes for the benefit of all.

Once during the early days of American history (1777-1789), the U.S. adopted a singular, every state for itself approach and the result was disastrous. Today we should know better.

Working together is always stronger that pulling apart with an “I/we don’t need anybody else” attitude.

No hotel department or restaurant division is successful in isolation.

Each has to be an integrated co-supportive professional community to be a truly successful and creative business. 

India will survive because she is one of the world's greatest nations blessed with an indomitable spirit.

It is our hope that India's recovery will be inclusive, embracing the right of all to the safety of light and an equally bright future for everyone.

Your Culinary World copyright Ana Kinkaid/Peter Schlagel 2012