The fate of being Indian.

I just returned from a death ceremony. A senior cousin of mine died
this morning. Five people involved in a head-on collision with a bus.
All dead. None of them had a chance.

It was sad seeing the community having to come together to support the
family after the loss. A father had lost one of his two sons, a son
had lost his father, and a village had lost one of its political
voices, apart from a community of chartered accountants having lost
one of their own. This is all just my cousin, mind you, and I can
only imagine what the loss of the other four lives could add up to. I
just don't know the others well enough at this point, apart from that
they were all precious in some way or the other.

It is consistently the same feeling - life is precious. Only on the
rarest occasions have I heard people actually celebrating the fact
that someone could pass on without suffering, and after having lived a
great, full, fun life. Blessed are those who get to do that, and
blessed are the ones who come to enjoy their company.

The majority of us live with health risks, physical danger, terrible
lifestyles not withstanding. These are just facts of life, and we
just don't need to add to the list. Terrible drivers are a fact of
life too. And they stand a very good chance of getting us killed.

I found a few conversations discussing fate, the inevitability of
death, and the philosophical perspectives were all well worn ones.
What frustrated me was that there were no rational conversations about
how the accident could have been avoided, so I had to investigate. I
asked the question straight - what exactly happened?

As it turns out, the Scorpio was driven by a 19 year old with a
reputation for rash driving. He tried to overtake a bus at speed,
thought he could muscle his way before the bus from the opposite
direction could come through, and all five on board paid the ultimate
price. It also turns out the 19 year old did not have a driver's
licence.

There you go, I pointed out - no fate, no inevitability of death, and
no God's wish. Just plain stupidity, bad driving, bad judgment, plain
old Indian incompetence. I wonder why people have to be so
incompetent even while having an argument, so much so that they cannot
differentiate between someone trying to get a point across, and
someone showing disrespect. It just doesn't matter, they said, it was
fate that made them let the kid drive!

It is interesting that everyone in the Scorpio had gone to send off a
political figure and were all active members of the AIADMK. To me, it
doesn't matter what party, but I could not help but think our
politicians are not even capable of being responsible about their own
safety and behaviour, so what the heck are they going to do about the
nation.

People, it is time to move away from dogma. It is time to rudely
shake people out of their stupor, for the time is gone when other
people's stupidity affects only them. It affects us all. It is fate,
I am willing to concede, that we are Indian. It is impossible to
choose where we are born. That is simply not in our control, so it
just could be fate.

What we do have control over is the Indian trait of blaming fate for
all our follies and failures. It wasn't fate that hundreds of people
lost their lives in Mumbai on the 26th of November last year. It
isn't fate that thousands of us die in road accidents every year. By
no means is it fate that our children are malnourished, badly
educated, and many of us are living below the poverty line. We need
to get this act of being Indian together, before we lose all semblance
of a rational existence. At the very least, those of us who are
rational deserve our chances of surviving against this dogmatic
incompetence that is uniquely Indian.