Divine vision

The year I remember correctly was 1998. I had accompanied my dad on a work-related trip he had to make to Delhi. With his meetings for the day done, both of us were strolling around the Connaught Place shopping area taking in the sights and sounds of the hub of the capital city. Delhi, setting aside for the moment its reputation for housing the not-so-rare irrationally or criminally ill-behaved citizen, happens to be the only Indian city truly deserving of being the capital of our nation thanks both to its historical importance and the imposing architecture & infrastructure of New Delhi. 

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So there I was, a small town boy wandering through the endless rows of alluring shops and restaurants, eyes peeled for all of the details, all of 13-14 in impressionable age. It's hard to say whether it caught my eyes first or my dad's but it can be said that we reacted simultaneously, hard core car enthusiasts that we were. A board over a newly opened showroom on CP said "Hindustan Motors-Mitsubishi" and both of us moved in its direction, mice uncontrollably drawn towards the cheese (if Tom & Jerry cartoons are to be believed)

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India was still a very bad place to buy modern cars or even spot them on the road back then, and cars like the Daewoo Cielo and the Ford Escort had just arrived to add some colour to the road traffic. The richest of the rich could still afford the 200% flat import duty on BMWs and Mercedes, which were visible on the streets of Bombay and Delhi but few and far between. For the common man, the only option for a modern car was the Maruti. Any new car launch was a breath of fresh air. Both my dad and me were extremely curious.

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Stepping inside the showroom, I took a sharp breath in and let out a wolf-whistle, instinctively and unashamedly. Ask any genuine car fanatic, and he (here I am discounting any similar lunacy in the opposite gender) will tell you that cars are not cars, they are people. Every car model has a story, a character and a reputation. What I saw there was a modern day legend. The room's interiors were purposefully poorly lit and in the centre on a slowly rotating dais under a perfectly sized spotlight, stood a red as blood Mitsubishi Lancer, gleaming with intent and begging to be raced away.

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Reigning World Rally Championship champion (in its Evo avatar), the Lancer was a car that every car magazine worth its salt devoted pages to praising. How it looked, how it drove, how it stirred the soul as it roared and skid through snow, sand, gravel and tarmac; through mountains, deserts, forests and cities was all what I had been reading about dreamily uptil now. Now that dream had been physically manifested right in front of me, out of the blue, on my home turf. I desperately wanted to possess it and I wanted it to possess me. It was as strange a sensation as could be. I was in love... with a car!

Jhamelaa

Image via Wikipedia

First up, let me state this frankly and clearly. In the past, I have avoided helping road accident victims. Many times. Because of the supposed 'jhamelaa' (complications). The normal excuses that people give like "The police will instead harass you for bringing in the victims about what you were doing there!" or "The hospital won't admit the injured victims in and they will die in front of your eyes outside the hospital entrance." were good enough for me to not get involved in any rescue operations.

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What I never did and never will do though is to hang around the scene of an accident, especially one in which the victims look critically injured without any purpose. It is surprising how many people actually do that in our country where the ambulance always takes too long a time to show up (due to a million reasons not under the control of the ambulance service) and the best chance for saving lives is to get them to the hospital in time somehow through personal initiative. If I cannot be of help, I move on so that someone who actually wants to help can do his/her job.

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On Wednesday evening, the day for Saraswati Puja here in Bengal, as I was making my way back home after work, on the narrow Beliaghata bypass road bordering the canal, I saw what I hated to see once more. Two guys sprawled in the middle of the road, heads split open, blood spurting out of their major head injuries and a huge crowd gathered around them. My first reaction was to thread my motorcycle through the people and go ahead ignoring the commotion, but this looked like something which had happened half a minute ago. I pulled over on the side and I still don't know why because this wasn't how I had behaved in similar scenarios before.

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Enquiries revealed that a speeding Ambassador car had knocked down the pair from their motorcycle, and then the car had fled from the scene. Needless to say, neither the car nor the motorcycle were driving at civilized speeds and the youngsters aboard the bike were wilfully ignorant of the rule that a helmet should be worn at all times while riding. People were standing around passing judgements "Should've worn helmets!", "I shouted at them to go slow just 200 m before. Now look!" or "The first one will definitely not make it. Look at the blood he is losing right now. He's gone!"

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I asked if anyone had called the police or an ambulance yet. No one had. I called the police emergency helpline 100 from my cell. Guess what? It was busy! And so it remained for the next 10 attempts I made. I asked of the locals if there were any government hospitals with emergency wards in the vicinity. Private hospitals have a even worse reputation when it comes to acceptance of accident victims for treatment so government is the way to go. I got a name, the Neel Ratan Sarkar hospital next to Sealdah station but no one had their emergency number. I finally got through to the police and gave them the location of the incident via consultation with the locals, and they said that they were sending help right away.

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The minutes were passing by and there was no sign of the police or ambulance. The pool of blood around the prone bodies was horrifyingly large now. Some kind soul was splashing water on their faces but that was about it. People were angry in a directionless kind of way and were diverting traffic away from the narrow side street we were on. I once again asked the people milling around the victims, "Is there no doctor around? Is there any way we can get these people to the hospital ourselves?" Back came the aggressive reply "Don't you know how much trouble you can get into with the police in simple cases like this. Lots of trouble. Who will take the risk? Will you?"

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And I said yes. To their credit, within a minute or so they found a Tata Ace mini tempo whose driver volunteered to help get the injured to the hospital. Bear in mind, all private vehicles had made sharp U-turns when the same request to assist was made to them. The injured were placed in the cargo hold but no one, absolutely no one from the waiting crowd wanted to accompany me to the hospital. I was asked to sit beside the driver and we set off for the hospital, with two critically injured persons just lying in the open hold like transported goods. It wasn't the best way to proceed but our options were limited and it certainly didn't feel nice as we headed towards the Sealdah hospital on a bumpy road. Half way there, we came across a lumbering police van making its way towards the scene of the accident and they asked us to move on towards the hospital.

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I was really tense now as I madly waved a red rag out of the window, the universal signal for an emergency, so that traffic cops would let our vehicle pass. How crudely would the police and hospital react? So were the tempo driver and his assistant. The driver said, "I am a poor man who drives this vehicle for someone else. I hope I don't get into trouble for trying to help." As we drove into the premises of the hospital and reached the emergency ward, we were on tenterhooks. Then came the real anti-climax when I ran into the entrance and explained the situation. The police inside the emergency ward were prompt in their response and the hospital staff even more so. True, they were one stretcher attendant short at that point of time and I had to assist to get the more critically injured person to the Operation Theatre (OT), but the doctors were buzzing around and doing their best. The cops were not interfering in any way and waited till both the victims were wheeled into the OT before asking me the basic questions of where, when, and how.

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The cops asked me the questions in as polite a manner as I have ever heard anyone speak, thanked me for not giving in to stories about their corrupt & rude 'behaviour' and said I could leave if I wanted to. The victim's family was being contacted by personnel from the nearest police station, they told me. All those stories about how victims were refused treatment and how their rescuers were prosecuted may have some basis in truth, but we as a people are so bogged down by preconceived notions of 'jhamelaa'. This is the 'kalyug' (Dark age) some people say and so we must weigh all the possible 'jhamelaas' before we even think of doing what is right. 

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The injured persons were still conscious and moaning in pain when they went into the OT, something which surprised me considering the massive amounts of blood they both had lost. The human body is a resilient machine and it fights till the very last. I do not know if they lived to see the next day. God willing, their lives may have been saved but at least I think I did what I could to the best of my limited abilities to give them a chance. What I do know is that I ride a motorcycle to work everyday and I wouldn't want to bleed to death on a side street while a couple of hundred people stood watching the 'tamashaa' (spectacle), just because they want to avoid the 'jhamelaa'. 

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All said and done, India is a country with imperfect systems and we have very little or no faith in them. We blindly assume that since the systems are bad, the people in it must be equally rotten too. When we have faith, hope and the will to make things better and operate under the assumption that people are basically good, the first 999 times out of 1000, the experience is likely to turn out to be bitter. It is an almighty struggle to maintain that belief in most situations we find ourselves in, but nothing is more important. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" may sound like a ridiculous cliche which is all too frequently disproven, but it forms the primary basis of how we as a species have survived thus far. If you don't trust your fellow man to behave as you would and be helpful, you are basically stating that you don't trust yourself to able to be useful. And that is a very sad state to be in.