Value of Human Death

I attended a safety meeting last week, to discuss operational hassles and reduction of health and safety risks. My presentation had two slides, mostly about minor spills and awareness about personal protective equipment (PPE). As I was the last presenter, I waited for my turn in the corner of the room, quietly sipping my Tetley dip-chai. The slides moved on.

I was being lulled to sleep by the quiet monotonous affair, when the slide switched again. The title of the slide: FATALITY

In black and white, with a few pictures and aerial maps, the grim incident unfolded before my eyes. There was a tractor, probably faulty, almost certainly devoid of critical maintenance, which had rolled over and fallen off the side of the road. As it was past sunset on a relatively unused road, response wasn't immediate. The driver of the vehicle, a poor man wearing a colourful turban, might have removed his seat-belt at the time of incident.

"The Injured Person or I.P. did not comply with policies," said the presenter. Without blinking, he explained the occurrence with an unwavering voice. "Since the previous accident, we have enforced strict driving rules. But compliance..."

The fact that a man had died grew upon me. A driver who I might have even seen on the road had suddenly ceased to exist. In front of me, people spoke of his death with academic interest. In the next slide, he appeared as a blip on a frequency chart and as a red block on a pyramid. The men accepted that their numbers didn't look pretty.

"He died," I said slowly to the man who sat next to me.
He looked at me and said, "Yes, they were better off last month."
"What do you mean?"
He pointed at the graph. No one had died in February. The other months had 1s, 2s and occasional 3s.

"Those are deaths?"
"Only the red ones."
"What about black? What's worse than red?" I asked, reading the colour-code.
"Oh, that's when many people die. Haven't had one in a long time."

The slides about the fatality had passed. They began to discuss an oil-spill. The man would remain as a point on a graph. And his family would get a six-figure sum as compensation.

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A farmer jumped off a tree at an AAP rally. Maybe he wasn't really a farmer, maybe he was a land-owner. He was, perhaps, rich. Maybe he wanted to contest elections as an AAP candidate. It could all have been staged.

But as the story goes, a man died in public view. No one could do much about it. And while there was temporary disruption in activity, nothing really changed. The show went on. The media arrived on the scene, and they have minted money off a corpse ever since.

If this had happened away from public view (and an AAP rally), Gajendra Singh would not be missed. There are have been nearly 3,00,000 farmer suicides in the country since 1995. Each one of these deaths could potentially bring a family to a stand-still. In a country of a billion, perhaps they don't matter?

On an average, 30-40 people have killed themselves per day. Some of these get reported, in the inside-pages of national dailies. Most of them don't get mentioned; they are unrecognized in life and in death.

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Did you know that 15-20 people are killed daily by Mumbai locals alone? 20 more people are maimed, crushed or left bruised and bleeding.

For every 1,00,000 vehicles on the road, nearly 210 people are killed on an annual basis. One person is killed for every 475 vehicles in this country. 2.5 lakh people are killed annually on Indian roads. Again, it is perhaps a small number and insignificant on an Excel sheet.

Nothing can be said about the accuracy of these figures, and statistics in developing nations are hardly reliable. In 2013, a medical research panel discovered that India was heavily under-reporting its Malaria fatalities. They found that the average number of deaths were in excess of 40,000 against a reported value of around 1,000.

We also report that around 6 children die out of every lakh simply because they don't get enough food. They die because there aren't enough grains of rice which enter their mouths, probably because they rot in remote godowns.

Each number represents the termination of as many human beings: humans who ought to be protected, nourished and allowed to grow in life, humans who should be mourned in death.

I still remember the boards on highways in the USA which sent shivers down my spine: "$100,000 FINE" (for hitting a pedestrian). Clearly, the value of life is vastly different in different parts of the globe. The Indian citizen isn't worth much. A poor Indian is worth nothing.

What are you worth?

Standstill

Ramu shifted uncomfortably in his seat, jamming the horn two more times, drowning Honey Singh’s melody within the car. Slanting rays of the sun scattered through the dust and smoke before falling on the hanging form of Hanuman carrying the mighty Sanjeevani. The monkey God swung violently every time Ramu stepped on the accelerator. The car lurched forward through tiny capillaries which the driver spotted in the clogged road.

In the back seat sat a man who was referred to only as Sharma sa'ab within the car’s confines. Ramu could see in the rear-view mirror above the monkey God that sa'ab was busy with his computer on his lap and his phone sandwiched between his left ear and shoulder. He was in a hurry; Ramu had fifteen minutes to make sure the boss got to his meeting on time.

“Lower the volume,” was the command. A knob was turned. The horn blared again through the static traffic.

“Be’nchod!” swore Ramu quietly. What would normally take him twenty minutes was now taking him over half of an hour. He felt the cards in his pocket, and thought about the game he had won the previous afternoon. The memory calmed him.

He slid the window down halfway, leaned towards it and spoke over the noise of the expressway, “Problem kya?”

“Pata nahin (I don't know)!” said the rickshaw-wallah whose vehicle stood alongside his own.

A motorist managed to squeeze in between Ramu’s right-side mirror and the auto-rickshaw. “There’s an accident in front of us,” he said, staring ahead through the cracks between trucks and SUVs. He nonchalantly closed Ramu’s rear-view mirror and passed them, expertly entering the gap between the bus and the divider.

Sharma sa'ab saw the motorist’s action and momentarily stopped his work to swear at him. “They are idiots, sir,” said Ramu in agreement. “They are from villages. They don’t know better.”

Sharma sa'ab stared ahead at the stubborn vehicles in front of him, and eyes widening, looked at the time on his laptop screen. “Jaldi!”

“Yes sir,” said Ramu, hitting the horn again forcing the traffic to move another centimetre. “Bloody fellows chose to have an accident today.”

“Yes, my luck is horrible,” said Sharma. “It’s always like this.”

Ramu looked at the dashboard-clock, then at Hanumanji and then at the red tail-lamps in front of him. Suddenly a gap opened up in the corner and Ramu, with all his experience, was the first to react. Driving is always a series of challenges and achievements: you overtake a supercilious fool, you give way to an old lady, you joust with a young man your age…

Ramu stepped on the pedal and turned the wheel ever so slightly, thus throwing the car brilliantly into the gap on the left hand side, stealing the rightful space of the vehicle alongside him. He glided between the remaining vehicles almost as if he was cutting through the jam with a hot knife. Horns blared behind him, and this satisfied both driver and boss greatly.

“Bas five minutes, Sharma sa'ab,” said Ramu as he drove out of the jam. The man in the back seat dialled a number. The car emerged from the cluster of vehicles, passing the sedan with a shattered windscreen - the culprit. As Ramu sped through shards of glass scattered across the asphalt like the brilliant stars of the night, Sharma saheb spoke on the phone – “I’ll be there in five. There was an accident in the middle of the expressway. One car has brought the city to a standstill.”

The driver adjusted his rear-view and kissed the locket around his neck as he peered into the mirror: police, stretchers, strangers and a boy whose world had come to a standstill.