Accidents

On Saturday when I reached office, I got to know that someone sitting on the second floor has died on the spot when he met with an accident where in a bus ran over him. He was heading for a cricket match which he was about to play regarding a tournament my organization had planned. He was into his second year at work. And the next day, Sunday, I got to know that my project lead who had taken a day off to visit his sick parents, survived a bus accident. The driver was on his cell phone and so was the driver of the approaching truck. The hit each other for a split second and both tried moving it the other way and the bus hit a tree. The glasses shattered and many a faces were smeared with thick instant blood. He had his luck and he survived when four other were rushed to an emergency. And after these tales, I headed for a live event quite unknowingly when at twelve in the night I took a break and planned a coffee. I was sitting there talking to friend overseeing a road curve and as we were engrossed into the minutes of your daily crisis at work, a Skoda speeded by. Into a small distance, it lost control and was about to hit blindly into the wall when it somehow turned back onto the centre and hit a bike and sped off. The biker was thrown away and as it was to be, he didn’t even got a scratch. He was lucky. And whenever I hit upon such things around me, I can never forget the Sunday morning when one of my closest friends had called me up from Kolkata to inform that his elder brother had met with an accident. He and his group were having morning tea after a tiring night at work when, a few meters away a high way heavy vehicle took a turn and slipped sideways and skidded all the way to the shop. Three were able to jump off sideways but the other two were in the front and the overturned vehicle took them all the way to a nearby tree and smashed them. They didn’t die. One got all his shoulder bones broken and the other, my friend’s brother, got his pelvic bones smashed. The guy with the shoulder injury recovered in a year but my friend’s brother has undergone more than twenty critical surgeries and is still critical. Rest aside the fact that his career is lost somewhere in that tea, it is already more than three years and he still struggles to walk.

These always pose a few questions to me and I never could get the better of it. Why do they happen? Is it a predefined fate which one has to encounter or is it someone paying for someone’s negligence and ways which would have happened for the best, as it is supposed to turn out as in near future? What thrill can speed provide at the cost of life and loss? Why do people try multithreaded tasks when they are not synchronized to execute? Can someone ever fight fate? If something predefined really exists, what hope do I have in defining it differently? Why does death differ in forms and content? And lastly, if I am the listener or the viewer, what is it that I am supposed to take from it?