Although some government power authorities, electric company executives, the departing power minister and much of India's news media blamed the grid failures Monday and Tuesday on various states they said had taken in more than their expected power allotment, thus causing the grid to fail, others called that a mistaken oversimplification.
The occasion, planned since an accord signed by Margaret Thatcher in 1984, was conducted in English and Mandarin, languages that most people of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong do not understand - a blunt reminder that, unlike previous acts of imperial retreat, the start of Chinese rule thrusts 6.4 million people into the embrace of a new master sometimes as alien as the departing power.
Only their dog is spared – although a departing Powers kicks its larynx so hard it can no longer bark.
As he prepares to depart office, Obama made a more forceful push for a new law that more carefully defined presidential power.
Everywhere the army, legatee of the departing colonial power, adopts not only the uniforms and ranks but also the sense of privilege and entitlement of the departing foreign power.
Its chairman and general secretary are departing and power is flowing to the party's left wing.
As the departing colonial power, Britain was charged with seeing both communities to independence in good order.
But whereas departing colonial powers made their chief prisoner the new president, in South Africa there was no departing colonial power.
They were simply bequeathed by departing imperial powers who left highly centralised, authoritarian states to a tiny group of western-educated Africans who rushed in and took over.
The dream fades a little with every passing year: the borders sketched in the sands by the departing colonial powers have turned out to be remarkably durable.
Social cohesion will be even harder to come by in many of the region's other states — like Iraq, Syria and Lebanon — which are contrived nations cobbled together by departing colonial powers.
