Man on all fours as ‘stepping stone’ for women to climb on rescue boat!

Praises are flooding the social and other media for KP Jaisal (33), a poor fisherman from Parappanangadi in Kerala’s Malappuram district, for ‘transforming’ himself into a ‘stepping stone’ in the waters to help women marooned by the floods to climb on to a rescue boat deployed in evacuation operations.

Several women used his back as a step to board the rescue boat from a flooded road where they were stranded.

Jaisal, a volunteer of the trauma care unit in Malappuram, says he knelt in the hip-deep water to help a woman who was profusely bleeding to climb on to a boat of the National Disaster Response Force at Muthalamadu in Vengara in the district at the peak of the yet-to-end deluge but in the end his back became a step for several more women, including healthy and young ones!

“I know from my experience with the trauma care unit that a bleeding woman should not be made to stretch her legs wide – in this instance – to climb on to a boat.

There were no other implements available at that time. Then I decided to turn myself into a stepping stone so that she could tread over me to the boat,” Jaisal told the media.

“I did not do it to become famous. That is no way to become famous either. My whole intention was to save people’s lives, the task for which we were assigned.

However, a video of that went viral and now people are calling me from everywhere,” Jaisal told the media standing in front of his one-room house at Havil beach in Parappanangadi.

Jaisal, who kept standing on his knees and hands with only his face over the water that had flooded the road, still does not think he had done anything great to deserve such praises and congratulations from all around, even from abroad. “What is important for me is not these praises. I am happy that I was part of a rescue team that saved several lives,” he says.

Even some young and healthy women could be seen using Jaisal’s back as a step to climb on to the boat not even taking off their footwear despite an NDRF man reminding them that they were stepping on a human being’s back and not on a stone. Jaisal and his friends had reached Vengara as per a call received from the NDRF.

Though the social media is abuzz with praises for Jaisal, for him and his fisherman friends it was part of their mission for which they had expected no rewards. After their assignment in Vengara, some 25 kilometers from his home, they left for rescue operations in Mala in Thrissur district over 140 KM away from Parappanangadi where hundreds had been trapped in the flood.