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Story so far: An editor in Denmark decides to push the envelope on self-censorship and free speech. He invites contributions from a bunch of cartoonists. The topic: The face of Muhammed. Background (in case you've been vacationing on another planet): Muhammed is the Prophet who founded the religion of Islam, which proscribes visual depictions of Muhammed himself, Allah (God), and, according to some severe interpretations, any person, in fact (effectively putting the kibosh on Michelangelo and his ilk).
Forty cartoonists respond, twelve of whom depict Muhammed (in defiance of Islamic proscription), some of which are in questionable taste. All are published in September 2005 (congruence with the World Trade Towers destruction month a coincidence?). Protests start from October 2005, varying from petitions from Danish Muslim groups to a request to meet the Danish Prime Minister by eleven Arab ambassadors. An apology is published by the newspaper. The meeting with the ambassadors is refused, apparently because the Danish government thought they were demanding criminal prosecution against the newspaper.
Protests escalate worldwide as publicity grows. Embassies in Arab nations are stoned and burnt. Riots break out. People die.
Arguments in favour of the cartoons range from freedom of speech and freedom of expression to, "Hey, we make fun of Christianity and our God and our politicians, so what's the big deal?"
As a reasonable member of humanity (I'm in a minority, I know, but bear with me) I find the whole imbroglio fantastic beyond belief. If I was to attempt to explain it to a visiting alien I'm not sure I'd be able to show humanity in a favourable light.
Let's start with the starting point, the cartoons and the request that prompted them. Does the Danish press have any doubts about its own freedom? Why did it feel the need to get up on a table and thump its collective chest about how free it was by publishing cartoons that it knew were offensive to a significant section of humanity? What's so offensive about self-censorship anyway? Maybe self-censorship in certain contexts can be viewed as a terrified response to threats and domination, but surely that wasn't happening here? Isn't self-censorship also an indication of maturity and a humane approach to tricky situations?
For example, an intelligent parent chastising a child is unlikely to use abusive language no matter what the provocation, and instead will try and get the point across in a reasonable way. That's self-censorship.
Or, a calm driver will not succumb to road rage and will refrain from giving the public finger to someone who cuts into his lane. He may well yell abuses safely within the confines of his own car, but will usually not roll down the window and inform the other driver of his questionable parentage. That's self-censorship. (Now you know my driving response tactics.)
Or, your best friend falls in love with a dork who gives you the creeps and you refrain from hurting his feelings by professing to admire her knowledge of the best way to cook sweet potatoes. That's self-censorship.
Self-censorship can't be all bad. So, why did the Danish newspaper feel this urge to do something about it.
The argument that we do it to ourselves and our religious figures, so we can do it to yours is asinine. It's on the lines of, "I beat up my wife, so it's ok for me to pop over on the weekend and beat up your wife too." Two wrongs don't make it right.
The West (and particularly Europe) prides itself on its mature approach to religion and its ability to separate Church and State. There is a lot of undisguised dismay, cynicism and ridicule aimed at the US for its unabashed espousal of the Religious Right point of view in these post-Clinton years. Much of this is because Europe has tried to pretend that it thinks of all religions as equal and equally worthy of scorn, a point of view that agnostics and atheists alike gleefully espouse. However we seem to have lost sight of the fact that religions continue to matter to those who practise them and if we are to live together, we have to agree that people are entitled to that opinion. Freedom of opinion, right?
Okay, let's move on to the reactions and responses to what was admittedly a decidedly stupid action. (Well, I'm not sure anyone else has admitted to it being a stupid action, but I sure think it was.)
If anything, the reaction has been even more stupid than the cartoons themselves.
How does burning an embassy and killing one's own people in riots constitute a sensible response? Boycotting Danish goods made some sense and would probably have hurt the West where it counted most - in their pockets. Rioting in Indonesia and Jordan and Syria merely proves the West's point, namely, that all Muslims are fanatical apes. Which is so not.
But the supreme irony of this entire episode is this:
"Danish" is an adjective meaning "of or from Denmark" and it's pronounced "Dane-ish". But there's another meaning and pronunciation. Pronounced "Done-ish" but with a soft "d" as in "there" (which oddly, doesn't have a "d" but does have a "d" sound) it means, guess what?
It means "intelligent" and is a common Muslim name. Yep, Muslim name.
Danish, Danish.
The world is weird.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Tarmac and Ice
Back online after an eight-day hiatus caused by some travel to very cold climes indeed. I'm now sitting in New Jersey in the relative warmth of 19 F, which on a more sensible scale is -7 Celsius. I have just escaped from Minnesota, where for my pains I was privileged to witness the coldest day of this year's winter at -8 F with a wind chill factor that brought it down to -17 F. Now, that translates to -27 Celsius. Let's spell that out: Minus twenty-seven degrees Celsius.
Back in Bombay I would have been basking in Plus twenty-seven degrees Celsius, a difference of 54 degrees.
My respect for Arctic and Antarctic explorers and mountaineers knows no bounds. My estimation of them as some of the daftest bravehearts to walk this planet is also confirmed.
Over the last week I've spent an unseemly number of hours in planes, airports and taxis. Also in taxi-ing planes at airports. And stationary non-taxi-ing planes, too.
My flight from Bombay boarded on time, pushed off from the gate then sat on the tarmac with an unspecified "technical fault" for 90 minutes. Not a very reassuring start to some serious globe trotting. However, we did take off uneventfully once the fault, whatever it was, had been fixed. I suspect it had something to do with the kitchen, judging from the inflight food, if one can dignify it with such a term.
On landing at Heathrow, we spent 45 minutes on the tarmac waiting for a gate. Since this was 50% less than the time spent at Bombay waiting outside a gate, it should be considered an improvement in service standards.
This was Saturday. Across the Atlantic the worst storm in living memory to hit the US eastern seaboard dumped 26 inches of snow in a few hours in New York. Naturally, since that was where I was headed next. (As a digression, what is it with this 26 inches figure? That was the amount of rain that Bombay received in July of 2005 in one night. And now New York does the 26 inch snowfall show.)
Saturday flights to New York were cancelled by the dozen, but since my flight was scheduled for Sunday, I feared not. More fool, I. We took off from London on Sunday on the dot, flapped across the Atlantic uneventfully, reached Newark airport on the dot, were granted a landing slot with no ado and touched down gracefully on the tarmac on the dot. Okay, I've given you enough dots for you to join them and figure out the magic word. Yes, tarmac!
We spent the next 3 hours (also reckoned as 180 minutes or 10800 seconds) sitting on the tarmac at Newark. Of course, this was in instalments of "a few minutes more", "just about five or six minutes to go", "momentarily" and similar reassurance-oriented lies. Apparently the plane ahead of us at the gate, an El Al airliner, had got stuck in the ice and couldn't be moved away from the gate. One would think that Newark airport with over a hundred gates around would have found us an alternative gate to spare, but it took them 2 hours (120 minutes or 7200 seconds) to do so. Some bright spark finally did get the idea after the 120th minute (or maybe union regulations prevented them from doing so any earlier) and they taxied us over to another gate. Alas, the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, as Robert Burns was wont to say. (Dunno why he couldn't speak the Queen's, but that could be because of those unnatural Scottish garments, kilts.)
At the new gate, we waited for another 1 hour (60 minutes or 3600 seconds) because the aerobridge was stuck in the ice and couldn't be extended out to meet our plane.
By this time, of course, the habitual restrained demeanour of four hundred odd passengers had melted (unlike the ice) and the air was thick with comments and suggestions being passed around. These ranged from exhortations to pop the chutes open and have us slide down to our old friend the tarmac (pretty daft considering it was minus umpteen Celsius outside and our butts would probably have frozen to the slide) to calls to pop open some of the bottles in the bar so we could all wet our whistles.
The crew on board being stoutly British passed the time by making announcements over the loudspeakers about how this kind of thing would never have happened in ol' Blighty. Strangely, all announcements were preceded by "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls" - they seemed to take their junior passengers very seriously.
My Monday trip to upstate New York was cancelled because flights refused to take off, but my Tuesday trip to Minnesota was on schedule. Of course, in their infinite wisdom when the airline cancelled my Monday flight they also cancelled my Tuesday reservation to Minnesota. I guess their reasoning went, "Since we cancelled Monday's flight and he couldn't travel on Monday, he wouldn't want to travel on Tuesday either, so though we'll have the flight take off, there's no point having him on it, so let's cancel his reservations all around. Tea, anyone?"
Modern American airports specialize in having fewer check-in staff around and in providing the passenger with the exciting activity of checking himself (or herself) in at a funky kiosk. So when the nearest kiosk cordially informed me that there was no way in hell it was going to check me in, I had to run around the airport to find something resembling a human being in authority that I could talk to. This turned out to be a short plump lady in spectacles and a beard who resembled a minor hobbit. The beard was a mere starter's edition, but impressive nonetheless for adorning the face of one of the fairer, less hirsute sex. However, Mama Hobbit turned out to be a godsend and far more impressive than appearances would portend. She tapped out some cryptic commands on a stone-age computer quicker than Neo dodging Agent Smith's virtual bullets and hey, presto! my reservations were reinstated.
Thankfully, that, so far, has been the last of the excitement as far as my air travel goes. Since then I've uneventfully negotiated a day trip to Chicago and a return to Newark.
Tomorrow it's London again and a few days later, Bombay. Let's see what the future brings.
BTW, tarmac is actually short for tarmacadam, a paving material of tar and broken stone, mixed in a factory and shaped during paving. Tarmacadam, in turn, is short for tar-penetration macadam, a type of highway pavement no longer commonly used. Tarmac was invented when E. Purnell Hooley was passing a tarworks in 1901. (A Eureka moment, presumably.) Or so I am credibly informed by Wikipedia. It is ironic that I have spent so much of my recent life on something that is no longer commonly used. Perhaps tarmac is really concrete. Not abstract.
The cold is addling my brain.
Back in Bombay I would have been basking in Plus twenty-seven degrees Celsius, a difference of 54 degrees.
My respect for Arctic and Antarctic explorers and mountaineers knows no bounds. My estimation of them as some of the daftest bravehearts to walk this planet is also confirmed.
Over the last week I've spent an unseemly number of hours in planes, airports and taxis. Also in taxi-ing planes at airports. And stationary non-taxi-ing planes, too.
My flight from Bombay boarded on time, pushed off from the gate then sat on the tarmac with an unspecified "technical fault" for 90 minutes. Not a very reassuring start to some serious globe trotting. However, we did take off uneventfully once the fault, whatever it was, had been fixed. I suspect it had something to do with the kitchen, judging from the inflight food, if one can dignify it with such a term.
On landing at Heathrow, we spent 45 minutes on the tarmac waiting for a gate. Since this was 50% less than the time spent at Bombay waiting outside a gate, it should be considered an improvement in service standards.
This was Saturday. Across the Atlantic the worst storm in living memory to hit the US eastern seaboard dumped 26 inches of snow in a few hours in New York. Naturally, since that was where I was headed next. (As a digression, what is it with this 26 inches figure? That was the amount of rain that Bombay received in July of 2005 in one night. And now New York does the 26 inch snowfall show.)
Saturday flights to New York were cancelled by the dozen, but since my flight was scheduled for Sunday, I feared not. More fool, I. We took off from London on Sunday on the dot, flapped across the Atlantic uneventfully, reached Newark airport on the dot, were granted a landing slot with no ado and touched down gracefully on the tarmac on the dot. Okay, I've given you enough dots for you to join them and figure out the magic word. Yes, tarmac!
We spent the next 3 hours (also reckoned as 180 minutes or 10800 seconds) sitting on the tarmac at Newark. Of course, this was in instalments of "a few minutes more", "just about five or six minutes to go", "momentarily" and similar reassurance-oriented lies. Apparently the plane ahead of us at the gate, an El Al airliner, had got stuck in the ice and couldn't be moved away from the gate. One would think that Newark airport with over a hundred gates around would have found us an alternative gate to spare, but it took them 2 hours (120 minutes or 7200 seconds) to do so. Some bright spark finally did get the idea after the 120th minute (or maybe union regulations prevented them from doing so any earlier) and they taxied us over to another gate. Alas, the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, as Robert Burns was wont to say. (Dunno why he couldn't speak the Queen's, but that could be because of those unnatural Scottish garments, kilts.)
At the new gate, we waited for another 1 hour (60 minutes or 3600 seconds) because the aerobridge was stuck in the ice and couldn't be extended out to meet our plane.
By this time, of course, the habitual restrained demeanour of four hundred odd passengers had melted (unlike the ice) and the air was thick with comments and suggestions being passed around. These ranged from exhortations to pop the chutes open and have us slide down to our old friend the tarmac (pretty daft considering it was minus umpteen Celsius outside and our butts would probably have frozen to the slide) to calls to pop open some of the bottles in the bar so we could all wet our whistles.
The crew on board being stoutly British passed the time by making announcements over the loudspeakers about how this kind of thing would never have happened in ol' Blighty. Strangely, all announcements were preceded by "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls" - they seemed to take their junior passengers very seriously.
My Monday trip to upstate New York was cancelled because flights refused to take off, but my Tuesday trip to Minnesota was on schedule. Of course, in their infinite wisdom when the airline cancelled my Monday flight they also cancelled my Tuesday reservation to Minnesota. I guess their reasoning went, "Since we cancelled Monday's flight and he couldn't travel on Monday, he wouldn't want to travel on Tuesday either, so though we'll have the flight take off, there's no point having him on it, so let's cancel his reservations all around. Tea, anyone?"
Modern American airports specialize in having fewer check-in staff around and in providing the passenger with the exciting activity of checking himself (or herself) in at a funky kiosk. So when the nearest kiosk cordially informed me that there was no way in hell it was going to check me in, I had to run around the airport to find something resembling a human being in authority that I could talk to. This turned out to be a short plump lady in spectacles and a beard who resembled a minor hobbit. The beard was a mere starter's edition, but impressive nonetheless for adorning the face of one of the fairer, less hirsute sex. However, Mama Hobbit turned out to be a godsend and far more impressive than appearances would portend. She tapped out some cryptic commands on a stone-age computer quicker than Neo dodging Agent Smith's virtual bullets and hey, presto! my reservations were reinstated.
Thankfully, that, so far, has been the last of the excitement as far as my air travel goes. Since then I've uneventfully negotiated a day trip to Chicago and a return to Newark.
Tomorrow it's London again and a few days later, Bombay. Let's see what the future brings.
BTW, tarmac is actually short for tarmacadam, a paving material of tar and broken stone, mixed in a factory and shaped during paving. Tarmacadam, in turn, is short for tar-penetration macadam, a type of highway pavement no longer commonly used. Tarmac was invented when E. Purnell Hooley was passing a tarworks in 1901. (A Eureka moment, presumably.) Or so I am credibly informed by Wikipedia. It is ironic that I have spent so much of my recent life on something that is no longer commonly used. Perhaps tarmac is really concrete. Not abstract.
The cold is addling my brain.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Grammys and kids - Lennon and McCartney
Was awoken yesterday at the crack of dawn by sounds emanating from the TV room. My kids had tuned in to the live presentation of the Grammys. Time was when I could recognise most of the names in the show. Now that's restricted to the Lifetime Achievement Awards.
I missed U2 but I did catch Mariah Carey - no, not literally, more's the pity, she's quite a delicious armful - and an assortment of rap and hip-hop moguls who made me wish I'd stayed in bed. Paul McCartney was average at best, which is such a sad thing to have to say of as pivotal a genius as him. Bruce Springsteen was at his spare best: I do think he does "Nebraska" kind of music so much better than "Born To Run" kind.
The strangest show was a toss-up between a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone (Stoned, more like it) complete with Joss Stone (no relation, I think) who is unreasonably cute and Steve Tyler who is wonderfully wacked out, and a duet with Linkin Park (Lincoln, get it? duh!) and Jay-Z, who being American is Zee not Zed. (Zed's dead, baby.)
Jay-Z was rapping for all he was worth and I was mentally tuned out until I noticed that he was wearing a John Lennon t-shirt. Where did that come from? I wasn't aware that Lennon was an icon for rappers. Then, surprise, surprise! LP and JZ broke out into "Yesterday" only to be joined on stage by the man himself. So there they were, Paul McCartney, LP's main dude (whoever he be) and Jay-Z resplendent in a Lennon t-shirt. That must have been the first time in almost four decades that Lennon and McCartney shared a stage. Even if one was in the flesh and the other was on the flesh. Weird.
I missed U2 but I did catch Mariah Carey - no, not literally, more's the pity, she's quite a delicious armful - and an assortment of rap and hip-hop moguls who made me wish I'd stayed in bed. Paul McCartney was average at best, which is such a sad thing to have to say of as pivotal a genius as him. Bruce Springsteen was at his spare best: I do think he does "Nebraska" kind of music so much better than "Born To Run" kind.
The strangest show was a toss-up between a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone (Stoned, more like it) complete with Joss Stone (no relation, I think) who is unreasonably cute and Steve Tyler who is wonderfully wacked out, and a duet with Linkin Park (Lincoln, get it? duh!) and Jay-Z, who being American is Zee not Zed. (Zed's dead, baby.)
Jay-Z was rapping for all he was worth and I was mentally tuned out until I noticed that he was wearing a John Lennon t-shirt. Where did that come from? I wasn't aware that Lennon was an icon for rappers. Then, surprise, surprise! LP and JZ broke out into "Yesterday" only to be joined on stage by the man himself. So there they were, Paul McCartney, LP's main dude (whoever he be) and Jay-Z resplendent in a Lennon t-shirt. That must have been the first time in almost four decades that Lennon and McCartney shared a stage. Even if one was in the flesh and the other was on the flesh. Weird.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Support needed
A day ago I had a stiff neck, probably caused by sleeping at an awkward angle. It felt like a vertebra in my neck had swollen. Well, it did.
That prompted the thought that if women had their breasts in a vertical line from chin to navel, they would probably need a verti-bra.
That prompted the thought that if women had their breasts in a vertical line from chin to navel, they would probably need a verti-bra.
Friday, February 03, 2006
Highway Blues
I seem to be doing a lot of morning drives lately. Early morning drives. Really early morning drives. Not all of them pleasant.
Thursday 6 a.m. saw me heading to a spot 300 kilometers outside Mumbai. The drive for the first 287 kilometers was uneventful, if refreshingly swift.
13 kilometers from our destination we encountered an accident. We didn't have one, but we came to close quarters with one. Accidents on India's highways are nothing new, but I've never encountered them as anything more firsthand than a mangled truck lying with its wheels in the air and its nose in a ditch. Usually about a week old. Those I've seen plenty of. There was a two-day drive that we once took from Mumbai to Delhi where we kept score of the accidents and we counted 104 of them. All but two involved trucks.
However, this accident had obviously just happened, perhaps a few minutes before we came around a bend in the road and spotted it. Well, it was hard to miss. An Esteem car was parked on the shoulder and its right headlight and fender was completely smashed; the rest of the car seemed untouched. A motorcycle lay in the middle of the road. Just beyond it were two bodies. Both were men and each was lying on his side in a crumpled heap. One had on a leather jacket, the other had a bandana tied around his head. Neither was wearing a helmet. A group of men and women stood around the two bodies; these seemed to be the car passengers. They looked like the small town, semi-well-to-do sort - far from your average below-the-poverty-line villager, but not quite city slickers.
We gingerly inched our car around the scene and goggled at it in typical rubberneck fashion. Two things struck me immediately: one is that, surprisingly, there was no blood to be seen on the road. The second was the attitude of the people standing around. Their chief emotion seemed to be bafflement. This was weird.
In the city when there's an accident, there is an immediate rush of onlookers to gawp at the scene. But the onlookers also contain a fair percentage of action-oriented doers who attempt to assist, call out instructions, hustle the injured into a taxi, or beat up the hapless driver. Here, in the rural hinterland, there was nothing of the kind - just a baffled, helpless look on the faces of all the hangers-on. There weren't that many of them either, just the car passengers, maybe four or five, and a few villagers who had been passing by. None of them seemed to have a clue what to do.
Everybody was simply standing around gazing down at the two bodies as if willing them to get up and get on with it. As if on cue, the man in the leather jacket groaned and tried to raise his head.
We had parked our car on the verge and were wondering what to do: drive on in a it's-none-of-my-business style or hop out and join the baffled lot in their bafflement. My chauffeur turned to me and said, "Help karega?" meaning "Shall we help them?"
Well, I was all for it, but I confess to sharing some of the bafflement of the party. What does one do in a situation like this? My knowledge of medicine is restricted to knowing when to pop two aspirins and that MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Once I've exhausted those two, I'm a spent force when it comes to healing.
What the two accident victims obviously needed was an ambulance: the lack of blood could have been a good sign, but somehow I doubted it. Internal injuries seemed likely. Both were hulking specimens and there was no way they would have fitted into any car, even if we could have picked them up and maneuvered them in. Not that that would have been a wise thing to do, given the possibility of internal damage.
All these thoughts flashed through my mind in the few seconds between parking the car and getting out. As soon as the baffled lot spotted a city slicker emerging from his car they shook themselves out of their torpor and meandered over to where I stood. Just then a State Transport bus appeared around the bend. They promptly asked me to stop it and request the driver to take the two injured men to the nearby town.
I have no clue why they didn't try to stop the bus themselves or why they thought I would be more successful at it.
In any event, their faith was ill-founded. The bus driver cast a dispassionate eye over the scene, shook his head forbiddingly at all of us, moved up a gear and took off down the road. In the next four minutes or so this scene was re-enacted with a jeep, an SUV, a small truck and another State bus.
This sudden burst of traffic seemed to enliven the crowd, whose numbers had been swelled by a couple of motor cyclists who had stopped, perhaps out of solidarity with two of their kin who had been mowed down. They decided that the two were safer on the shoulder of the road rather than the center and some of the burlier specimens managed to half-carry, half-drag the bandana-clad man, who was most at risk from being run over, to the side of the road.
While I had been watching these proceedings, I had not been idle. Technology to the rescue. I whipped out my cell phone and dialed 100 for the police. As soon as my phone was spotted in my hands, a set of the group detached themselves from the main lot and clustered around me to gawp at my phone; obviously a more interesting spectacle than the accident victims. It struck me, even at the time, as quite ghoulish.
The first time I dialed 100, I was cordially informed by a recorded message that all lines on the route were busy. I disconnected, waited a few seconds and tried again. This time the phone rang. After about five rings someone answered. I explained that I was calling from a few kilometers outside the nearest town, on so-and-so road and that there had been an accident with two people badly injured and that an ambulance was needed. I was asked by the voice at the other end where I was calling from. I went through the explanation again. Ah, but I needed to call another number which the cop would be happy to give me if I would take it down.
By this time, hearing my conversation, most of the crowd had transferred their attention to me, so I was able to collar one of the gentlemen closest to me and get him to write down the number that was being dictated to me in Marathi. (For some reason, even in the urgency of the situation I remember remarking mentally that his shirt was a crisp white khadi one. And that his hand shook while writing.) Numbers in anything other than English are not my strong suit, but surprisingly I could figure out what the numbers were and could dictate them in turn to the gent. There was obviously no point in continuing the conversation with 100, so I disconnected and tried the number I'd been given.
No luck. I just got the exasperated tone of an invalid number being dialed. White shirt helpfully volunteered the area code of the locality we were in, so I tacked that on and redialed the number. I got a different exasperated tone. Over the next three minutes I tried various permutations of area code and phone number and got precisely nowhere. White shirt belatedly discovered that he had a cell phone too and started dialing the various permutations frantically. I have no clue why he hadn't thought of it earlier. Shock, probably. I also have absolutely no clue why cell phone networks are so bloody opaque!!!!
In the meantime, my chauffeur had been trying to wave down various passing vehicles with absolutely no luck. Leather jacket was still moaning feebly, bandana was unconscious, crowd had returned to their baffled stupor.
Enough was enough. We were getting nowhere and time was running out. I told the crowd that we would drive on ourselves and attempt to contact an ambulance or the police at the next town, which was about ten minutes away, but could well have been in China for all the good it did us at this spot.
We got back into the car and sped down the road. In about five minutes we reached a toll booth. While we were paying the toll, I asked the teller if he had a phone on which he could call the police as there had been an accident a few kilometers away. As soon as he heard the word accident, he sat up alertly, then hopped out of his booth and yelled at a colleague to fetch the boss. His yell was taken up by other colleagues who appeared from nowhere. This was obviously more interesting than making change for tolls. But this display of interest and alacrity heartened me, until the said boss emerged hastily from a hut a little way behind the toll booth.
He was a youngster who looked like he had bunked college that day to hang out on the highway. He also looked quite clueless, but I was shamefully wronging him. He proved to be the most resourceful guy yet. He heard what I had to say and then whipped out his cell phone and punched out a number. He repeated what I had said, and was evidently given another number. He repeated it to confirm it, disconnected and dialed the second number. This is a trick that I just can't do. I need to write down a number so that I can look at it while I dial. My respect for toll boss grew. Whoever answered the second number wanted more details than toll boss could give him, so he handed me the phone. I got into my routine once again, starting as usual with the location of the accident. Amazingly, the voice on the other end immediately grasped what I was saying and even before I could complete my sentence, he asked me to hold on. I could hear him barking orders to someone to grab the jeep, take 3 or 4 men with him and go down to the accident spot. Once that had been done, he returned to me and then asked me more details about which vehicles seemed to have been in the accident. He then reassured me that he would handle the matter and rang off.
I thanked toll boss and returned his phone to him. He explained that he had called the local cops - that was who I'd been speaking to. I was feeling good about the sense of urgency that the guys at the toll station had about the whole incident and about the way the cop on the phone had reacted quickly and sensibly.
We drove on. About three minutes later the penny dropped. We had been passed at the accident scene by about 10 vehicles heading in the same direction that we were. All of them would have had to pass the toll booth before we did - there was no turn off in the road before the toll booth. All of them had seen the accident. Yet, when we spoke of it to the toll attendants it had clearly come as a complete surprise to them! Obviously, not one of the other passers-by had thought the accident and two dying victims either important or worthwhile or even interesting enough to be mentioned to the first authority that they had encountered.
Reluctance to stop at an accident and get involved is perhaps understandable, given the way that authorities and red tape can sometimes create unforeseen and unpleasant repercussions for innocent passers-by. But this was more than a reluctance to get involved. This seemed to be just plain disinterest.
The value of human life is evidently very little indeed.
About an hour later, my appointment done, we drove past the spot again, headed back home. The Esteem was still parked at the side of the road, with the motorcycle next to it. There were no victims lying around, there was no crowd. I could only hope that help had reached them in time.
For the rest of the drive, my chauffeur took extra care when overtaking or encountering two-wheelers.
Thursday 6 a.m. saw me heading to a spot 300 kilometers outside Mumbai. The drive for the first 287 kilometers was uneventful, if refreshingly swift.
13 kilometers from our destination we encountered an accident. We didn't have one, but we came to close quarters with one. Accidents on India's highways are nothing new, but I've never encountered them as anything more firsthand than a mangled truck lying with its wheels in the air and its nose in a ditch. Usually about a week old. Those I've seen plenty of. There was a two-day drive that we once took from Mumbai to Delhi where we kept score of the accidents and we counted 104 of them. All but two involved trucks.
However, this accident had obviously just happened, perhaps a few minutes before we came around a bend in the road and spotted it. Well, it was hard to miss. An Esteem car was parked on the shoulder and its right headlight and fender was completely smashed; the rest of the car seemed untouched. A motorcycle lay in the middle of the road. Just beyond it were two bodies. Both were men and each was lying on his side in a crumpled heap. One had on a leather jacket, the other had a bandana tied around his head. Neither was wearing a helmet. A group of men and women stood around the two bodies; these seemed to be the car passengers. They looked like the small town, semi-well-to-do sort - far from your average below-the-poverty-line villager, but not quite city slickers.
We gingerly inched our car around the scene and goggled at it in typical rubberneck fashion. Two things struck me immediately: one is that, surprisingly, there was no blood to be seen on the road. The second was the attitude of the people standing around. Their chief emotion seemed to be bafflement. This was weird.
In the city when there's an accident, there is an immediate rush of onlookers to gawp at the scene. But the onlookers also contain a fair percentage of action-oriented doers who attempt to assist, call out instructions, hustle the injured into a taxi, or beat up the hapless driver. Here, in the rural hinterland, there was nothing of the kind - just a baffled, helpless look on the faces of all the hangers-on. There weren't that many of them either, just the car passengers, maybe four or five, and a few villagers who had been passing by. None of them seemed to have a clue what to do.
Everybody was simply standing around gazing down at the two bodies as if willing them to get up and get on with it. As if on cue, the man in the leather jacket groaned and tried to raise his head.
We had parked our car on the verge and were wondering what to do: drive on in a it's-none-of-my-business style or hop out and join the baffled lot in their bafflement. My chauffeur turned to me and said, "Help karega?" meaning "Shall we help them?"
Well, I was all for it, but I confess to sharing some of the bafflement of the party. What does one do in a situation like this? My knowledge of medicine is restricted to knowing when to pop two aspirins and that MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Once I've exhausted those two, I'm a spent force when it comes to healing.
What the two accident victims obviously needed was an ambulance: the lack of blood could have been a good sign, but somehow I doubted it. Internal injuries seemed likely. Both were hulking specimens and there was no way they would have fitted into any car, even if we could have picked them up and maneuvered them in. Not that that would have been a wise thing to do, given the possibility of internal damage.
All these thoughts flashed through my mind in the few seconds between parking the car and getting out. As soon as the baffled lot spotted a city slicker emerging from his car they shook themselves out of their torpor and meandered over to where I stood. Just then a State Transport bus appeared around the bend. They promptly asked me to stop it and request the driver to take the two injured men to the nearby town.
I have no clue why they didn't try to stop the bus themselves or why they thought I would be more successful at it.
In any event, their faith was ill-founded. The bus driver cast a dispassionate eye over the scene, shook his head forbiddingly at all of us, moved up a gear and took off down the road. In the next four minutes or so this scene was re-enacted with a jeep, an SUV, a small truck and another State bus.
This sudden burst of traffic seemed to enliven the crowd, whose numbers had been swelled by a couple of motor cyclists who had stopped, perhaps out of solidarity with two of their kin who had been mowed down. They decided that the two were safer on the shoulder of the road rather than the center and some of the burlier specimens managed to half-carry, half-drag the bandana-clad man, who was most at risk from being run over, to the side of the road.
While I had been watching these proceedings, I had not been idle. Technology to the rescue. I whipped out my cell phone and dialed 100 for the police. As soon as my phone was spotted in my hands, a set of the group detached themselves from the main lot and clustered around me to gawp at my phone; obviously a more interesting spectacle than the accident victims. It struck me, even at the time, as quite ghoulish.
The first time I dialed 100, I was cordially informed by a recorded message that all lines on the route were busy. I disconnected, waited a few seconds and tried again. This time the phone rang. After about five rings someone answered. I explained that I was calling from a few kilometers outside the nearest town, on so-and-so road and that there had been an accident with two people badly injured and that an ambulance was needed. I was asked by the voice at the other end where I was calling from. I went through the explanation again. Ah, but I needed to call another number which the cop would be happy to give me if I would take it down.
By this time, hearing my conversation, most of the crowd had transferred their attention to me, so I was able to collar one of the gentlemen closest to me and get him to write down the number that was being dictated to me in Marathi. (For some reason, even in the urgency of the situation I remember remarking mentally that his shirt was a crisp white khadi one. And that his hand shook while writing.) Numbers in anything other than English are not my strong suit, but surprisingly I could figure out what the numbers were and could dictate them in turn to the gent. There was obviously no point in continuing the conversation with 100, so I disconnected and tried the number I'd been given.
No luck. I just got the exasperated tone of an invalid number being dialed. White shirt helpfully volunteered the area code of the locality we were in, so I tacked that on and redialed the number. I got a different exasperated tone. Over the next three minutes I tried various permutations of area code and phone number and got precisely nowhere. White shirt belatedly discovered that he had a cell phone too and started dialing the various permutations frantically. I have no clue why he hadn't thought of it earlier. Shock, probably. I also have absolutely no clue why cell phone networks are so bloody opaque!!!!
In the meantime, my chauffeur had been trying to wave down various passing vehicles with absolutely no luck. Leather jacket was still moaning feebly, bandana was unconscious, crowd had returned to their baffled stupor.
Enough was enough. We were getting nowhere and time was running out. I told the crowd that we would drive on ourselves and attempt to contact an ambulance or the police at the next town, which was about ten minutes away, but could well have been in China for all the good it did us at this spot.
We got back into the car and sped down the road. In about five minutes we reached a toll booth. While we were paying the toll, I asked the teller if he had a phone on which he could call the police as there had been an accident a few kilometers away. As soon as he heard the word accident, he sat up alertly, then hopped out of his booth and yelled at a colleague to fetch the boss. His yell was taken up by other colleagues who appeared from nowhere. This was obviously more interesting than making change for tolls. But this display of interest and alacrity heartened me, until the said boss emerged hastily from a hut a little way behind the toll booth.
He was a youngster who looked like he had bunked college that day to hang out on the highway. He also looked quite clueless, but I was shamefully wronging him. He proved to be the most resourceful guy yet. He heard what I had to say and then whipped out his cell phone and punched out a number. He repeated what I had said, and was evidently given another number. He repeated it to confirm it, disconnected and dialed the second number. This is a trick that I just can't do. I need to write down a number so that I can look at it while I dial. My respect for toll boss grew. Whoever answered the second number wanted more details than toll boss could give him, so he handed me the phone. I got into my routine once again, starting as usual with the location of the accident. Amazingly, the voice on the other end immediately grasped what I was saying and even before I could complete my sentence, he asked me to hold on. I could hear him barking orders to someone to grab the jeep, take 3 or 4 men with him and go down to the accident spot. Once that had been done, he returned to me and then asked me more details about which vehicles seemed to have been in the accident. He then reassured me that he would handle the matter and rang off.
I thanked toll boss and returned his phone to him. He explained that he had called the local cops - that was who I'd been speaking to. I was feeling good about the sense of urgency that the guys at the toll station had about the whole incident and about the way the cop on the phone had reacted quickly and sensibly.
We drove on. About three minutes later the penny dropped. We had been passed at the accident scene by about 10 vehicles heading in the same direction that we were. All of them would have had to pass the toll booth before we did - there was no turn off in the road before the toll booth. All of them had seen the accident. Yet, when we spoke of it to the toll attendants it had clearly come as a complete surprise to them! Obviously, not one of the other passers-by had thought the accident and two dying victims either important or worthwhile or even interesting enough to be mentioned to the first authority that they had encountered.
Reluctance to stop at an accident and get involved is perhaps understandable, given the way that authorities and red tape can sometimes create unforeseen and unpleasant repercussions for innocent passers-by. But this was more than a reluctance to get involved. This seemed to be just plain disinterest.
The value of human life is evidently very little indeed.
About an hour later, my appointment done, we drove past the spot again, headed back home. The Esteem was still parked at the side of the road, with the motorcycle next to it. There were no victims lying around, there was no crowd. I could only hope that help had reached them in time.
For the rest of the drive, my chauffeur took extra care when overtaking or encountering two-wheelers.
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