R.I.P.

There was absolute mayhem on Airport road (Bangalore) and other adjoining roads last evening. News of a disastrous accident had started filtering in around 4:00 pm yesterday. A colleague of mine said that he'd heard that a Volvo bus, one of those humungous red monsters, had rammed into close to 15 pedestrians, killing all of them! Are you kidding?!? That was exactly what the expression on everyone's faces conveyed! I mean, it sounded like a massacre!

The many of us who left from work at the usual hour had no clue what lay in store for us. We were caught in slow moving traffic, well, almost standstill traffic, for more than 2 hours. The usual journey from work to home that takes about half an hour to 45 minutes at the most for me, ended up being a veritable long haul!!! As we sat in the company bus, twiddling our thumbs, news kept flowing in of how the bus had apparently manoeuvred way out of control because of the brake not functioning. What I found surprising was that the radio channels seemed to concentrate only on how the traffic was not moving at several places in the city, rather than on the loss of human lives! These channels were even asking people to send in reports of where they were stuck, for how long they'd been stuck, and such other comparatively less important problems! In the wake of the human tragedy that had taken place, the least they could have done was to devote some air space to the people who had so unwittingly lost their lives, and to the many more battling for theirs as a result of the catastrophe that had ensued!

Finally, after a journey of well over 2 hours, most of which entailed a lot of waiting, I got home. I rushed to switch on the television and tune in to one of the news channels. NDTV was covering the tragedy. What was heartwrenching was that most of the people who had been injured were employees of HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited). Those poor, unsuspecting people had just been coming out of their workplace after their share of the day's work, when before they could realize what was happening, the monster of a bus had rammed right into them! Can you even fathom something like this happening to you or any of your loved ones!?! Those people would have also got out of their homes in the morning, fairly sure that they would be back to the comfort of their beds, after a hard day's work! Little could they have in their wildest dreams imagined the events that followed.

The news further reported that the bus had first rammed into an autorickshaw, the driver of which had been severly injured and was battling for his life at a nearby hospital. It then rammed into a pole, before tolling the death bell for the people coming out of the HAL office. Though the official report was that 2 people had been killed and many many injured, angry HAL employees claimed that most definitely more than 2, at least 3 people, had lost their lives! They also said that they'd asked for a traffic signal/traffic policeman at that very spot an umpteen number of times, only to have got no adequate response from the administration. An angry mob had burnt down the bus and also completely cut off that road to any kind of traffic, which accounted for the chaos on the adjoining roads.

This morning, there were still a large number of cops milling all around that place, doing all sorts of inspections and questionings. Can any of these after measures account for the lives that have already been lost, for the lives that have been maimed by this incident, for the sense of fear that has been instilled in the minds of the victims and their loved ones? Is anyone safe on the roads anymore? Even today morning, on my way to work, the cab driver had to swerve rather suddenly and unnervingly, to avoid hitting two young girls crossing the choc-a-block road, with traffic flowing from both sides! Has life becomes so less valued? Or, has the race against time become so important that we'd rather risk dying than waiting a few minutes on the sidewalk, just a few minutes till the signal turns red and the traffic halts to let us pass!?!

Rather than sermonize on the perils of reckless driving and carelessness, something that has been attempted by countless others, I only pray that the souls of the deceased rest in peace.