Two incidents involving a class-XI girl student of Holy Cross College and another, a male student of the Military Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), have once again proved the aphorism 'man proposes but God disposes'. If the incident involving the Holy Cross College is one of the many which can be traced back to the country's indifferent system, there is no explanation for the other one. In the first incident, the girl was making a rickshaw ride for appearing at her college examination. At the Maghbazar rail-crossing, her rickshaw was hit by a train and ran over one of her legs. Taken to a hospital unconscious, she knew much later that her leg has been amputated.
In the other incident, the MIST student went to Gazipur Safari Park with some of his friends on the occasion of Pahela Baishakh. God knows what foolishness possessed him! The boy climbed on the wall of the tigers' den. To demonstrate his oversmartness and perhaps foolhardiness, he inserted one of his hands inside the iron fence and beckoned to a tiger at some distance little aware that another tiger was just nearby. The second tiger jumped to bite his hand. Others present there pulled him from behind and the tiger from the opposite direction. Thus the boy lost his hand which was torn apart from elbow.
In case of a girl student, it is now an unwritten law that someone accompany her -only more so when she goes to sit for an exam. In this case she was alone. Engrossed in her study even when the rickshaw was at the railway crossing, she did not have the slightest inkling that a train was approaching to reduce her to a physically handicap. What the rickshaw-puller did is not known. A fatalistic philosophy will not explain the matter. Someone has to take the responsibility. Repeated pleas for ensuring safety at railway crossing have fallen on deaf ears. The way traffic jam holds vehicles right on the train lines at such crossings is a potential cause for accidents.
The other day a bus-load of passengers got so panicked when the Sadarghat-bound vehicle was trapped right in the middle of the Maghbazar crossing just at the time a train was approaching blowing its whistle that they jumped out of the window. Many got hurt and a few had their bones fractured. Tragedies of far greater proportion took place at this and other railway crossings but it seems no one has learnt any lesson from those disasters. What is intriguing is that the men on duty there asked those who jumped out of the bus, why they did so. They wanted to convince the bus passengers that since the serious accident in 2009, they just hoist a red cloth when vehicles get trapped and trains already moving at a slow speed come to a halt. Was it convincing enough?
The student of the military institute has no one else other than himself to blame. If there is anything to argue in his favour, it is the extra something of his age that has led to his tragic consequence. Every stage of life has its speciality. He has fallen victim to his overdrive of life. Blaming him for his foolishness will not quite explain the life's mystery. Why did so many people meet their life's end in pursuance of conquering the world's highest peak Everest? Why did adventurers perish in the hostile poles of Antarctica? Man alone, not any other animal, makes this extra effort when he has no problem in meeting his biological needs.
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