Drill

Well, these days we have drills and guidebooks for everything. From cracking an exam, impressing women, making million dollars sitting at your home, scamming, and corning to those safety drills and emergency evacuation drills. Our very nature and obsession to control and rehearse everything possible continues to drive me crazy.

Emergency alarm goes out, someone listening to Menson or MegaDeath at full volume also couldn’t have unheard the alarm. Half of them new exact time when the alarm would go out and rest knew anytime in next two hours it would. Half ready to evacuate and quarter of them checking their watches every five minutes and rest either staring at their liquid crystal displays and hitting keystrokes after keystrokes for greater good or because they were just as idle as me.

We run. We evacuate. Some take photographs. Some laugh. Some gossip. Some crib. Some get much awaited chance to strike a conversation. Some chatter on phone. Some watch. Some are still lost. I, I want to go home.

I can’t help but watch people. It is addictive I tell you. It amuses me to see how amongst thousands of people, they slowly start gravitating towards one another or in other words get repelled from some other ones and others. Folks up the food chain seem to settle down in a corner, checking if their latest Van Heusen didn’t catch some grease from the emergency evacuation, if the shoe polish is still ok, if the expensive scarf is still intact. Social butterflies just can’t seem to get enough of action. So excited they need to probably text it to their mates who probably work around the same complex. Disastrously good looking girls, I mean the ones who know that they make heads turn, start drifting to one side of the field. Gossip junkies won’t let a minute go to waste. On the other corner, you see folks desperately waiting for their next nicotine stick, discussing if it would be alright to light one while the guy on the stage explains types of fires and demonstrates how to extinguish fire. You see the working class, the cleaning and maintenance staff hanging by the fence, probably looking at us and smirking, bunch of so called intellectuals dressed as such a real life misfits. Security doing rounds, who has probably worked hardest for this ten minutes evacuation drill. Eternally lost, cynical, sarcastic social misfit like me standing by the side and watching…

Watch as thousand people breathe and sweat and yap in the small front yard. Stare as they laugh or frown.

What they or no one understands is when one of the five elements decides to pull the switch. You are not going to gravitate, you are not going to drift, you won’t have time to laugh or frown. You will run. Crowd won’t have a face. You won’t know whose lips, ears, groin or eyes you’ll be stamping on. You won’t know whose blood you have on your Ritu Kumar or Peter England. When smoke fills up the floor and you can’t see the ones working a few cubicles away, you won’t hear any voices but just the chaos. And the thing about chaos is, it’s fair. It doesn’t have a face, doesn’t leave one behind, just the scars.

At least then we won’t drift socio-economically or pseudo-intellectually.

Now, that’s a drill. We just need a push.

Neo

Crash

It seemed like just an ordinary day. Cousin was leaving to go back to his air-base at Bidar. We had had a nice weekend. We partied a lot, some heart to heart talk took place, blew a bit of money and we were all set to bid good-bye.

I was riding him back to bus stand.

An annoying truck was leaking water from its top and was spitting unbearable black smoke and incidentally we were riding bumper to bumper behind that truck. If you ask me now, I would still say, “I thought I would make it, just in time. Overtake the truck before any vehicle came from the other-side and sail smoothly after that.

I agree I made a dash and what I didn’t account for was, the truck might just shift a bit to its right and the girl in a green top and brown skirt walking close to sidewalk, might just decide to swing her basket right to left and drift towards the road. As we dashed closer, I realized it wasn’t to be, I won’t make it.

I screeched onto my breaks. Emm…we were in moderate speed and there were enough tiny granular particles on the road to skid the bike when I clinched onto breaks.

I don’t know what exactly happened. I fell on my right side, with the bike, sliding a little bit further into the mud towards side-walk. The whole thing came to stand-still for me when my helmet covered head rested on the ground, with my body parallel to fallen bike and nose right opposite to spinning front wheel. That was the moment when I closed my eyes. Exhaled and realized what had happened and then opened them again.

I could see a couple of men running up towards us. I didn’t know yet what had happened to my cousin. I found out later he had a tiny bruise and he was a little luckier, he didn’t fall down. No, my entire life didn’t flash before my eyes. One is too shocked in a situation like this for the whole life to flash by. When you fall down and the shock waves pierce through your tattered clothes, bruised skin, hampered tissue layers and through your bones, up until your senses, you often take a while to realize what has happened. Until the blood from my elbow dripped onto my sandals, I didn’t realize I was bleeding. But when I did, it was time to hit back home asap and clean up.

Well, bleeding didn’t stop, we rushed to hospital. As I walked limping towards Dr. Bevin, he probably knew, there was something up my sleeve. Well, there was, a bleeding wound. I couldn’t even shake hands properly; he just raised his eyebrows and adjusted his specs to have a better look that meant I spill the beans…

He asked me to go to ER and requested a nurse to clean me up and he shall have a look.

Turns out, I’ve a puncture wound. To help me understand, he said “It is like a Gun shot. Just that you went and jumped on the stand-still bullet (foreign body) at the speed of 30-40kmph.”

I’m waiting now, to hear from the Surgeon on further course of action.

As much, I’m worried about bruised knees, tainted black-bluish-reddish shoulder, my puncture wound, worried but angry parents, pending projects at office, solitary confinement in my apartment for coming days, I’m more worried because of the certified rash driver that I’ve become.

Neo