Elphinstone Stampede is ‘our’ not govt.’s fault

One day, while standing roadside next to - a whey-abusing gym-monkey throwing banana peels everywhere with gay abandon and a 14-year-old spitting chewed gum & wrappers straight onto the road joyously - I watched the cars, that floated by, spit out empty water bottles & red bull cans; I serendipitously witnessed a car, whose driver was Instagraming, bang into another car. Smash! The bumper came undone & it quickly blended with the gum, peels, bottles, cans, wrappers. In a civilized country, the Instagramming-dude would’ve come out furiously apologizing followed by immediately sharing his third-party insurer’s details for the repairs [I’ve even seen 19-year-old teenaged Indians do that in Melbourne]. He [the instagramming dolt] came out of his car - all red & stunned - & quickly began accusing the victim that he was driving too slow & not letting him overtake. You know the rest of the story.

In that glorious moment, I had an epiphany & I swiftly jotted it down:

“The trouble with this country is that its people don’t have the balls to accept when they’re wrong.”

The govt., cops, judiciary, system - we’ve an array of official bodies to slap the blame on. Media colludes with the ‘people of the nation’ as they also are bereft of the balls to call a spade a spade. It’s a practical decision as it would be rather naive to blame the people who are providing for your multi-grain bread & organic butter and particularly when they’ve died - it’s blasphemous to blame the dead - people's YouTube court has even forgiven Saddam. Contrarily, I’ve constantly called out the mind-blowing lack of intelligence, reasonability, and consideration of the ‘people of the billion nation.’ That’s why TOI & Hindustan Times have millions of readers & I’ve about 37 a day.

Elphinstone disaster isn’t a result of govt.’s negligence - it’s a natural outcome of our spur-of-the-moment-all-too-familiar-stupidity. Elphinstone station’s bridge isn’t different from most of the other not so state-of-the-art bridges on the 100s of Bombay's local stations. Ripping apart the govt. for the shoddy infrastructure for the stampede is similar to the dead tenant’s family blaming the landlord because he didn’t fix the creaking walls, leaking ceiling, and ancient electrical cabling for their only son’s untimely death by electrocution that no one saw coming. But, the fact that he died of electrocution because he was bare feet while cooking on an unlicensed company’s coil heater whose end-wiring was naked while plugged into the already suspicious socket is lost on the heavy-duty mourning family & TRP-driven media [even The Hindu & The Indian Express]. 

That’s exactly what we do when the overloaded buses roll over, when people standing in the middle of the road get run over by buses, when 100s of pilgrims drown when they blatantly ignore Met’s [the weather dept.] heavy rainfall warnings, when people refuse to vacate dilapidated apartments even after the authorities have sent them eviction notices, when we die because of electrocution while shamelessly stealing electricity, when we die crossing the road without the ‘walk’ signal instead of taking the crores-worth foot-over bridges, when we die in two-wheeler accidents, 100-thousand a year, because we didn’t give a rat's ass to the warning that highways are not for two-wheelers & helmets save lives, when we slip on banana peels & break our jaw, when elevators crash because we overload them, when we die because wearing a seat belt is so first-world loser shit for sissies, when we ironically drown while drowning idols [durga, ganesh], when we slip down a building while taking the 47th selfie of the day, when we get into a head-on collision because we were driving on the wrong side of the road, when teenagers break open their heads after taking a fatal fall while trying to break the matki [dahi-handi] during Janmasthami.

Though, India is a Badshah of inequality, when it comes to ignoring the law & blaming someone else, we’re as United as the unanimously racist Parsis of South Bombay.

I know some of the readers are like - Hey, Asshole, people don’t always have a choice - they’ve to steal electricity to survive, hop into over-crowded buses as that’s the last one, don't take foot-over bridge as they are too old to climb 25 steps & go to the pilgrimage to carve their path to heaven. To that reasonable retort, I’d simply say ‘we always have a choice.’ As proof, I present to you the first page of Shantaram [Gregory David Roberts’ autobiographical novel]

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.” 

Aakar Patel, working for a newspaper in the 90s, reported everyday, without fail, on average 10 deaths due to people crossing platform via rail tracks instead of the foot-over bridge. Initially, he believed that reporting it everyday will lead to a lower number eventually, but of course he was dead wrong. People continued to kill themselves with absolute consistency day after day - year after year. 2o years later, I, everyday, take a foot-over bridge [with uber cool, transparent elevators] to reach my workplace. I’m mostly the only one. People continue to risk their & motorists’ lives without a care in the world by taking the highway-like road beneath.  

In my 6-odd years in Melbourne, I found people overtly wary of their physical safety. Sometimes I thought they were nuts to write - The Contents Are Really Really Hot - on a coffee cup & labelling bloody everything - waiters cautioning the guests - plates are extremely hot - not letting even a single person more than the prescribed limit on the buses. Fining people for Jay-walking & jumping a red light at 2am when no vehicle was in sight for miles. I definitely realized, in time, that - no matter how silly it may have seemed to me - it saved lives. In India, lives don’t matter.

Infrastructure in India will continue to be not upto the mark for eternity, but we can pull our act together & ensure that we give full crap about our & others’ safety even if the authorities don’t. Also, understand that govt., like films, is a reflection of society. The people in power didn’t descend from ‘Mars’, they came from ‘Maas’ like we did.

The point, if it isn’t crystal, is that we have to start ‘reflecting’ & putting the blame on ourselves [Akon did] & start giving a shit. What our renewed attitude will result in is fixing a lot of avoidable disasters & saving a lot of lives. Because when one person dies, s/he is never the only one.