Column

That a little boy, in a wave of greeting, an everyday act both joyful and familiar, loses his life because in unthinking, he stuck his head out of the window - how does one come to terms with this kind of tragedy?

Or another little boy, travelling in a train, marvelling at the scenery - since by wondrous good fortune he has a window seat - gets his hand sliced off, as does his mother, because a door, apparently come loose from a passing train flies across and hits them both, in a grievous reversal of that fortune. The father of that boy later reportedly says that he had not even realised his baby’s hand had been sliced till he saw the blood on his shirt whilst comforting the poor child’s anguished tears.

These recent calamities have not been borne out in times of dramatic unrest - a horrible natural disaster, a large scale terror attack - yet their consequences are as hurtful, grievous. Freak incidents that one could not have anticipated, that one was unprepared for. A business CEO taking an early morning walk in a park with his wife gets hit by a falling tree. The damage proves fatal. Ordinary, everyday life still has the power to snatch away happiness, just like that. Moments of gladness in otherwise dreary routine - good cheer on a drop home, the wonder of a train journey, family time on a morning walk - overturned in an instant. The kin of those involved in such tragedies and other like them, how often they might have gone over the sequence of events in their minds, thought ‘If only we had…’

Of late, there seem to be freak adversities everywhere: A fire in a train, a blaze in Maximum city’s Manish Market - whodunit/why: not known, loss of lives/of livelihoods: grim.

Driving home the fact that disasters happen. They come without warning, and they devastate lives. So who does one hold accountable? Beating ourselves up, for not possessing enough foresight, not being pre-emptive enough, for not having known is part of the grieving process, psychologists will tell you. But how really, could we know? Where then does the responsibility lie? Julian Barnes, in his Booker prize winning novel, ‘The Sense of an Ending’ explores this very question, theresponsibility for events, even seemingly unconnected ones, through the reasoning of a forward thinking character in the story. There is individual responsibility, there is collective responsibility, and then the murkiness of everything in between. We are also used to assigning responsibility to Lady Fortune, as in that Abba ditty, ‘The gods may throw the dice, their minds as cold as ice and someone way down here, loses someone dear…’

But we do live in the real world, so apart from ourselves and the gods, perhaps greater accountability from those we have chosen to lead us/show us the way might well be called for. As in the relevant authorities for: a) not following school bus rules on window bar grids, b) regularly checking for hazards on trains, c) pruning flora and fauna in the city, d) other…?