There are three terrible shocks that I am trying to get out of my head this week. One is a WhatsApp video someone forwarded to me. It shows an accident between a car and a camel and I had to quickly turn it off, but the five seconds I saw left me sickened and my heart racing. The camel was alive and trapped.
Part of my brain was leaning to anger — a camel is a massive thing. How does one miss seeing it on a road? Anyone can see it coming from a fairly long distance. So, then what sort of person sees it but doesn’t brake? Clearly, someone who is either asleep at the wheel or not quite in control of the wheel.
But then I thought, it could even be a fake video. One never knows these days. Videos can be digitally manipulated. Though why anyone would manipulate or create such a video is beyond comprehension.
The second horror was the news report about a woman who died because of a pothole-ridden road in Mumbai. She was riding pillion on a motorbike. The streets were flooded, and in such situations, potholes aren’t visible in any case. The man riding the bike did his best to maintain balance but failed. The woman riding behind him fell off the bike and was crushed by a speeding bus.
The police was reportedly looking for the bus driver, though it was scarcely his fault. Or at least, only as much at fault as the city municipality. The roads have been potholed and the streets flooded all over the city. Injuries and diseases are inevitable. The municipality fails — over and over, year upon year — to keep the roads in decent shape, repair and fill potholes before the monsoon starts. The state government cannot seem to ensure that drainage systems work and construction is not carried out in a manner that leads to blockages. After all, this is a city that sees rain five months of the year. It is not likely that the state doesn’t know how to prevent or minimise flooding. The question, then, is why it will not act on existing knowledge.
The third horror is the news that a man called Manoj Patil sent out a message on WhatsApp urging people not to spare people who were in a red car. The result was the lynching of a young Google engineer in Bidar.
My horror stems not from the lynching itself; there have been far too many in recent memory. It stems from the fact that someone decided to murder a perfectly innocent young man — a father himself, and a man who was probably fond of children and happy about being back home in India — and thought he would get away with it because his hands were not the ones strangling or stabbing him. He only had to spread fake news about ‘child lifters’. An anxious mob would do the rest. They would see a young man giving out chocolates to kids and, instead of talking to the kids or even calling the cops, they would beat these strangers to death.
My horror stems from the fact that a red car and someone distributing sweets to kids ignited something virulent in the mind of another man, who decided to send out messages labelling the inhabitants of the car as kidnappers, without a shred of evidence.
Why did he do it? He did it, I suppose, because he could. Perhaps to test whether he could ask for other people to be killed, and succeed. A yellow or pink car would have served the purpose just as well. Next time, will it be a yellow or pink car? And is next time inevitable?
The author is a writer of essays, stories, poems and scripts for stage and screen