The last Picnic..!

All of us have watched with horror how the Rathi family got washed away in gushing water of Patalpani waterfalls in Indore few days back. Miraculously, two members out of the five survived this accident and were rescued at some distance from the waterfall. It saddens mind to see someone dying in this fashion. When they had started from their house in the morning, they must have had plans for a very enjoyable picnic. Unfortunately, it turned out to be last picnic for three of them.

(Those of you who have not seen the clipping can type ‘Patalpani accident’ in google or youtube and you will see the clipping of around 4 minutes. However, weak hearted people stay away from this video.)

After every such accident, there is a tendency to find out its root cause. And in this case, it is the overconfidence of this family, which caused it in the first place. There were lots of people around them at the time of incident. When someone noticed unusual increase in water flow he raised an alarm and they all immediately rushed to the shore. This family, however, chose for a few seconds to enjoy the rising waters. These few seconds turned out to be very crucial for them. Soon, the speed and quantity of water was so much that they had to stand where they were, in order to resist being washed away. And then a little imbalance weakened their grip on ground and inevitable happened. They all held on to one another till the end. Every one of them needed a support in that situation while all were equally helpless.

Let us look at some of the lessons to be learnt from this incident.

Overconfidence thrills but kills

What is more surprising is that during last 10 years there have been 45 casualties in same spot and yet people refuse to learn. Everyone feels that nothing will happen to him. We come across several situations in our daily lives, where people with overconfidence try to do some adventures to impress others around them. These include the college students hanging recklessly on footboard of buses, or young boys speeding on motorbikes, or people in Mumbai travelling on local tops or people speeding cars on Mumbai Pune express way. What these people do not realize is that they may get away with it once, twice or even thrice. However, luck does not favor you when you stop taking care of yourselves. No one wants to meet with an accident, yet accidents happen every day.

Respect Nature

More people have been killed due to natural disasters during last decade that the number of people killed due to terrorist activities all over the world in last four decades. Yet, people forget that they should not play around with nature. No person can resist the forces of nature. The mightiest of human being will be helpless, if there is an earthquake, or a lightening, or a flood. A small stream of water in adverse conditions can sweep you off your feet and a small fire can ravage vast jungles in summer.

We have so far not understood the laws of nature fully well. How do we explain that 9 gigantic planets move around the sun at thousands of kilometers per hour speed in their own three dimensional orbits without ever colluding with one another? There are neither traffic policemen nor signals to control them. And we are not able to drive our car smoothly during traffic hours on simple laid out roads.

The fury of Tsunami was witnessed on a massive scale in half the globe in 2004 and very recently in Japan, which made it temporarily economically unstable. The whole world is reviewing its plans of Nuclear power after this incident.

The Rathi family needed to be more careful, as time and tide waits for no one.

Death is certain but timing is not

There is a very interesting anecdote in Mahabharata, in which the 5 Pandava brothers are passing through a forest. They feel thirsty and look around for water. They locate a lake and go one by one to drink water. But there is a Yaksha sitting on a tree nearby who stops them. When resisted, the Yaksha makes 4 of them them unconscious by using his powers. Lastly, Yudhishthira goes there and is stopped by the Yaksha. Yaksha asks him to answer few questions before he can drink water. And one of the questions is ‘What is the biggest surprise in this world?’ Yudhishthira replies, “The biggest surprise in this world is that everyone knows that he is going to die one day, but no one actually thinks about his death. Everyone feels that still there is a lot of time for him to die.”

In movie Muqaddar ka Sikander, Amitabh makes entry in the film through a song sequence, whose one of the stanza starts like this.. “Zindagi to bewafa hai .. ek din thukaraegi.. Maut mehbooba hai apne saath lekar jaaegi..”  While everyone alive has to die at one point or other, no one would prefer to die in this fashion. Rather, no one would like to die in first place.

Because of the uncertainty associated with timing of death, the Hindu scriptures recommend uttering god’s name during every conscious moment, since we do not know which one is the last one. And anyone uttering god’s name at the time of death attains Moksha or salvation. There is a beautiful bhajan by Anup Jalota which says, “Itna to karna swami.. jab pran tanse nikle..” This bhajan depicts the conditions, under which if one dies, will get the salvation.

We pray that the souls of three members who died in this incident REST IN PEACE.