I recently watched The Railway Men, and the series singularly made me question the very existence of humanity and at the very same time celebrated it without doubt. The series is based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy which occurred on the night of 2nd and 3rd December, 1984 on paper..... but had roots way back when some 'super educated' people thought that it was a great business idea to manufacture MIC (Methyl isocynate) in India in a pesticide plant named The Union Carbide India Limited . Also, the series talks about the unsung heroes of that night, the people who fought with fate a heavy war and saved innumerable lives, the death count could have be many fold had those people not risked their lives for the common public which is either seen as a 'market' or a 'vote bank'.
The tragedy and it's consequences are not hidden, and neither is the fact that the company owner of that time came to India, was convincted but he conveniently flew back to the US. In exchange for thousands and millions of life, the company paid a good $470 million to the government which reached to the public or not is obviously known. However the case is still not closed and I fear if it ever will. Here in this world, some peices of paper have way more power and much larger vocal cords than the humans do. All you need is some lakhs-crores and there you are, all set free even if you've murdered many.
But let's skip this part, I wanted to write all of this down because the series did leave an indelible impact on me and I wouldn't have been able to focus on anything else until I wrote all this down. The fact that how, all we knew till date was of the tragic incident, of the 3,787 deaths, half-million injured people and the people suffering since then. Nevertheless, there was something we were never told, we were never told that when such a tragedy strikes what did we do, what are we doing and what will we do? But then I saw the series and I realized that, it would always depends on the kind of a person you are, you may be an Express Bandit but when you see people dying in front of you and you lend a hand for help, you are a true HUMAN. But you can be a multi-millionaire, educated, successful person, knowing all about the consequences of your negligence but if you chose to hide your discrepancies and throw the weight of your sins on someone else's soulders, then you're NOT a HUMAN, you are what a friend of mine rightly said, "Just a bunch of organs put together".
Many died, are dying and will die in such tragedies, but there would be many others who would come to their aid, and yet many more who wouldn't either care or would just care for their own interests. I believe such tragedies occur because the Almighty sitting right above wants to test His creation and I know he must also be always left in splits, always contemplating if his decision of creation of the mortal world was okay or not.
We say Shivji is the Lord of Destruction. However I believe we have fairly managed to unburden Shivji, 'cause we are literally creating our own destruction! And it isn't as if we don't know! We know cutting down forests and burning them is burning the environment. We know nuclear weapons mean catastrophe. We know plastic will not just choke the drains, it has the capacity to choke us to death. Just as those people sitting there, setting up the factory knew that methyl isocynate is fatal and can certainly cause a catastrophe, yet the workers were not properly trained, yet safety wasn't taken into consideration, not just by those businessmen but even by the government that bragged about it's concern for the public. The fact that they all knew, makes the tragedy even more scary.
And do you know what is even scarier? The scariest fact is that even today there are millions ticking time bombs around us and..... We know...!
But as I stated, most of us are best at hiding our discrepancies rather than rectifying them. Yet, what amuses me the most is that whenever such catastrophes happen we still have the audacity to say, “It is the Gods who Destroy. ”
Category:World
