Death, Not By Numbers

Last Thursday a woman got off her taxi on the Bandra Worli Sea Link and went towards the railing. CCTV cameras caught it and two security guards, who were posted nearby, came over and talked her out of jumping off to commit suicide. About a week before that, on the same Sea Link, a young man told his taxi driver to stop because he had dropped his monkey cap. He went over, retrieved it, and then walked to the edge and jumped down, killing himself. The effort he put in to fool his taxi driver on his way to die seems slightly surreal because in one’s last moments, these are not the wiles that should occupy the mind.

The bridge has had a number of suicides over the past few years, with nine recorded cases in 2014. It is possible that news reports of the young man’s suicide had been read by the woman who was saved. As indeed the young man himself might have got the idea from others who took the leap before him. That is why the phenomenon called ‘copycat suicides’ exists. Because to look at the Sea Link from a normal person’s eyes, you wouldn’t think death is a certainty by jumping off it. It just doesn’t seem high or lethal enough.

The police and Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, under whose authority the bridge operates, always get a dollop of bad publicity every time someone commits suicide there. And hence the CCTVs and increased patrolling. Those are not measures that anyone can quarrel with. But even pre- cautions can lead a slippery slope. Those who want to kill themselves will usually find a loophole, but to the overseers of the bridge, it means even more measures are needed. And that is when you enter the territory of the absurd. Because there are now proposals to have huge nets lining the Sea Link to prevent anyone from jumping off, and also raise the height of the railings with wire meshes on top. If someone still manages to jump after that, they might perhaps start thinking of reducing the height of the bridge itself.

The simpler thing would be to just let the person who wants to die, die. That might sound callous, and many will argue that surely saving human life is more important than the cost involved in terms of resources and bad architectural aesthetics of wire meshes and nets. Maybe so, but not if you consider that the Sea Link claims only a handful of lives by way of suicide.

On the other hand, Mumbai’s suburban railway network kills more than 3,000 lives every year because commuters either fall off trains due to overcrowding or are run over while crossing the tracks. That’s about 10 deaths every day on the tracks to 10 deaths every year on the Sea Link.

But those deaths are not shocking enough because they have been happening year after year with unfailing regularity. And whatever the authorities do to curb it is never going to be enough because of a mixture of impossibly stretched infrastructure and bureaucratic incompetence.

Fatalism, or the meek acceptance of things as they are, is the way to go with the Sea Link too. Or at least start with safety nets for railway trains first.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

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