Milan Krishna Rao, 27 years old, a tech entrepreneur, was rushing for a meeting when his red-coloured compact car flew off the newly inaugurated Bio-Diversity fly-over, landed on the road below, killing Mrs Satyaveni, who was waiting with her daughter, while on a search for a house in the locality. This was a second gruesome accident on the flyover. A few days ago, a zooming car hit four youth who had stopped their motorcycles to take selfies — two were thrown off and fell down — dead.
Every day, across our country, people go out on roads of all kinds for the business of their lives. Every day newspapers are filled with reports of such mindless deaths, caused by erratic irresponsible drivers — some drunk, some driving faster than they should for adventure, and many others, plain irresponsible. Often, they kill innocent pedestrians, smaller vehicles, innocent bystanders, who surely don’t deserve it.
We are a nation of law-breakers. We drive aping our powerful leaders, for whom the roads are cleared, zooming past at lightning speed, sirens blaring. We ape them, honking our way out of impossible jams, at menacing speeds; and feel powerful. Such people shame us, threaten us and make a case that we perhaps do not deserve anything better than bullock carts.
It is a feeling of terror with which most of us drive, walk and tread out, with the greatest achievements of humanity — automobiles, flyovers —becoming an instrument of death, and both the incidences and probability of death in a road accident rising for each one of us.
Yes, the police have to adopt a no-nonsense approach to rash and drunken driving and stringently enable law and act against those who rationalise that talking on a mobile while driving, not wearing a helmet or a seat-belt is harmless.
Till then, we as a society can only paraphrase Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, and pray, “Father, don’t let my country die... on its roads.”
