Take Two

Life Is Not Beautiful

Madhavankutty Pillai | 18 Dec, 2011

There is nothing shocking about the AMRI fire

Neville Maxwell’s book on the 1962 Sino-Indian war talks about the ministry of defence coming out with information on our losses in 1965. The number of Indian soldiers killed was reported to be 1,383; another 1,696 were reported missing. Assuming the missing to also be dead, the fatalities add up to 3,079. Last month, a passengers’ association got its reply to an RTI application filed to Western and Central Railways, the two arms of Mumbai’s surburban rail system. It was asked how many people had died in rail accidents over the past three years, and the reply said 11,000 (3,500-plus a year). Every year, more men and women die crossing the tracks in Mumbai than a proper war had claimed. These deaths neither shock nor evoke a ripple of outrage in us.

Like all poor overpopulated countries, we take death for granted. It is only when something extraordinary happens, like 90 patients choking to death in the AMRI hospital fire, that we rage. Anyone who is asking the usual questions— how could the hospital not have fire alarm systems, how could it not have an emergency response plan—is deluding himself and perhaps hypocritically. The concrete mix of that road you walk on, the exhaust fumes of the bus you take to office, that extension in your house, the pesticides in the vegetables you eat, the bacteria in the water you drink, the sulphur in the air you breathe… there is nothing around you that is not substandard or a flouting of the letter. Death is like an aura around you; it can be slow and steady from the carcinogens in your lunch or it can be brutal like a car driven by a drunk teenager who never had to take a driving test before getting his licence. At some point a fire has to happen and it could be in any of the hospitals in any city with the same consequences. You are not dead in that fire merely because the law of probability saved you.

All this will change. Distasteful as it might sound, as people become richer, their lives get more value. And follow in the trajectory of all developed nations. We will eventually evolve to a point where it is not normal for 3,500 people to die every year crossing railway tracks. That will be the time when a tragedy like the AMRI fire will merit the shock it has evoked. Till then, just be thankful you are alive.