The sheer size of this event is amazing -- Fully half the country without power.

Link to CNN story

True the scale is astounding, imagine whoel population of USA x 2 without power...

And its possible it could even be a worldwide event lasting who knows how long.

Events of this scale are had to imagine.

Not really that hard to imagine. A high altitude nuc' weapon burst could cause an EMP which could trigger a very widespread power outage. What's hard to imagine is what this would look like in the second month. Unlike India, much of the damage from an EMP would be to hardware not easily or quickly replaced... or so I've read.

Meanwhile, power has been restored in India.

From that article:

I'm scratching my head on that statement. True that my electrical engineering degree is maybe a couple decades out of date, but I think they probably meant the voltage would have dropped, not the frequency. But then, I specialized in the low voltage side of EE, not the power distribution side. We called those power folks "hummers", because everything they touched hummed.

ok... how do you get an electric wall clock to work on 50.2 Hz?

a 43/36 gear reduction?

I doubt many clocks these days depend on power line frequency as their timebase. It is inheritantly inaccurate.

IIRC, 50.x Hz is normal for a 220/240 grid system. Unlike us in North America, where 60Hz and 110/120 is the standard.

So I guess it just hums a few notes lower.

Except for the microwave all my clocks are battery,I HATE it when the power goes off and the alarm doesnt....GRRRRR!