We have, over time, cultivated a culture where survival itself is a calculated risk. Every ordinary act carries within it a quiet negotiation with death. You step out of your house not merely as a citizen going about your day, but as a participant in a lottery where the prize is simply returning home alive. The tragedy is not that accidents happen. Accidents happen everywhere. The tragedy is that here, accidents do not feel accidental. They feel rehearsed. Predictable. Almost inevitable. A bus does not just fall into a river. It was always heading there, guided by negligence, reckless driving, unfit vehicles, and a system that treats enforcement like a seasonal ritual. A building does not suddenly collapse. It had been collapsing for years in slow motion, hidden behind approvals, signatures, and the quiet compromise of standards. A fire in a factory is never just a fire. It is a culmination of locked exits, ignored warnings, and the invisible lives of workers considered expendable. And yet, after every incident, we perform the same rituals of grief.
We gather around screens. We scroll through images we wish we had never seen. Twisted metal. Scorched walls. Shoes without owners. We count the dead, then recount them, as if accuracy might bring dignity. We wait for official numbers, then compare them with unofficial ones, as if somewhere between the two lies a truth that matters. For a few days, we are shaken. Sleep becomes difficult. The cries of the bereaved echo longer than usual. There is anger, but it is a tired anger, one that knows its own limits.
Then something remarkable happens. We move on. Not because we are heartless, but because we have learned that grief, in this country, must be economical. We cannot afford to carry every tragedy to its logical conclusion. If we did, we would collapse under the weight of it. So, we ration our outrage. We mourn selectively. We forget strategically. This forgetting is not a failure of memory. It is a survival mechanism.
There is a philosophical cruelty in this. Human life, in theory, is considered invaluable. We say it often enough. We teach it to children. We write it into policies and declarations. But in practice, the value of life here appears negotiable, conditional, and alarmingly low. It is not that we do not know how to prevent these tragedies. We do. The solutions are neither mysterious nor unattainable. Enforce traffic laws. Ensure structural integrity. Maintain infrastructure. Regulate industries. Hold people accountable. The problem is not ignorance. The problem is indifference. Indifference is more dangerous than negligence because it does not even pretend to care. It creates a system where responsibility dissolves into abstraction. Everyone is responsible, which means no one is. The driver blames the system. The system blames circumstances. Circumstances, of course, cannot be prosecuted.
There is a peculiar irony in how we respond to risk. We are individually cautious but collectively careless. A man may hesitate before crossing a road, calculating the speed of oncoming vehicles with remarkable precision. But the same society will tolerate unlicensed drivers, overloaded buses, and roads designed without basic safety considerations. This contradiction reveals something deeper about us. We have internalised the idea that danger is inevitable. That chaos is part of the landscape. That safety is a privilege, not a right. Once you accept this, everything else becomes easier to justify.
Why question unsafe construction when buildings have always been like this? Why demand accountability when past tragedies have yielded none? Why expect change when the system has shown, time and again, that it can absorb outrage without altering its behaviour? Resignation becomes a form of wisdom. But there is a cost to this wisdom. It erodes the very idea of citizenship. When life is precarious, rights become theoretical. When safety is uncertain, freedom becomes limited. You are free to move, but not without fear. You are free to work, but not without risk. You are free to live, but only within the boundaries set by an unpredictable environment.
And what is normal? Normal is a bus accident every other week. Normal is a factory fire that briefly dominates headlines. Normal is a collapsed building that sparks temporary outrage. Normal is the quiet understanding that any of these could happen to any of us at any time. Normal is unacceptable, yet deeply entrenched.
There is also a strange hierarchy of attention. Some deaths receive more coverage than others. Some tragedies become national conversations, while others fade into obscurity. This selective visibility reinforces the idea that not all lives are equally significant. But for those who lose someone, the scale of the tragedy is irrelevant. For a mother, the loss of her child is not a statistic. For a family, a single death is a universe collapsing. We, on the other hand, consume these universes as content. We watch. We react. We share. We forget.
It would be comforting to believe that change is imminent. That one particularly horrific incident will finally break the cycle. That public outrage will reach a tipping point. That accountability will become unavoidable. The truth is more sobering. Change, if it comes, will not be sudden. It will require sustained pressure, institutional reform, and a collective refusal to accept the current state of affairs. It will require us to move beyond momentary grief and engage in persistent demand for accountability. It will require us to believe that our lives are worth more than this.
Until then, we will continue to live in this uneasy balance between caution and inevitability. We will advise each other on how to stay safe, even as we know that safety is never guaranteed. We will mourn each loss, even as we prepare ourselves for the next.
(The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author)
The writer is an academic, journalist, and political analyst. Email: [email protected]
