One cop was beheaded in Jharkhand and the government decided to go all out against the naxals, who had ‘crossed limits’.

One cop bled to death in Tamil Nadu, ‘under the watch' of two Tamil Nadu ministers and a district collector, who did nothing to save his life. Have they not ‘crossed’ enough ‘limits’ for the government to get strict with them?

Everytime I watch that video where Vetrivel gestures for help and flops down in the middle of the road, everytime I see the red in the frame when the ambulance finally arrives, everytime I look at Paneerselvam with his veshti hitched up, Moideen Khan's oh-where-am-I look and collector Jeyaraman’s frantic phone call – it’s not the ‘extras’ on the ‘set’ that get to me but the complete nonchalance of the authority figures present.

Their faces didn’t show any remorse, the way they stood around they might as well have been waiting for the driver to fix a flat tyre. Is that what the lives of people on the roads mean to our elected leaders?

What gets my goat is their rationalisation of how they tried to ‘help’ the dying man.

Boss, were you worried that your car seats will get ‘dirtied’ by all that blood? Was it that you felt nauseas and didn’t want to take the ‘risk’ of that chicken biryani coming out in a spout of vomit?

Or was it that you thought your drivers wouldn’t be able to find their way to the nearest hospital?

What were the reasons for you to stand around listlessly and ‘wait’ for things to happen, we want to know.

Yes, we saw one of your men pour water on his face, standing away like he was a leper. Yes, we know you gave away your pretty shawl and asked your personal doctor to ‘save’ him.

But what we don’t know is why you couldn’t have put him in any of the cars part of your convoy – not physically, you could have asked one of your lackeys to do it for you – and take him to a place where he would have had a much better chance of surviving than the middle of the road?

If that didn’t occur to you Einstein, then I don’t want to know why you wanted to ‘help’ the country and be a leader in the first place.

I’ve heard so many indignant responses from people over the entire issue – what was the cameraman doing, they ask. Why don’t we question his role before we blame the ministers?

Why should the common man who was standing right there not be blamed, my friends question. And then they come to what they always come to – why should the media play that damned video again and again, just to gain TRPs?

Frankly, I don’t know if the ‘freelance cameraperson’ had a vehicle; I don’t know how many locals there had an access to a car which could take him to a hospital, and I don’t know how many of them would even have had the guts to get into a ‘mess’, thanks to our system.

But let’s not forget that a political leader has more responsibility than the common man, and these guys definitely had all the means needed to save him – or at least try to do the same.

And the fact that the government is trying to defend their action, rather inaction, just doesn’t help anyone’s case.

The writer is a BCom student from Chennai.