4 kids collapse in water during Holi celebration

Holi revellers in an indoor hall in

Vepery

spent anxious moments on Thursday when four children who were playing in a shallow pool of coloured water with scores of others suddenly collapsed.


The presence of mind of one of the photojournalists present there, Ravikumar, saved the life of 13-year-old Naman. Ravikumar performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the child and revived him . Naman was then rushed to hospital. Their parents took the other three children home.

The event management form that had organised the Holi

party

, complete with water showers and a shallow pool, at an indoor hall on Jothi Venkatachalam Road claimed no such incident had taken place, though scores of people, including this TOI photojournalist, were present.

The onlookers said they were taken aback seeing the children collapsing in the water within few minutes of stepping into the pool at 10.50 am. Everyone, including this journalist, first thought the children had suffered an

electric shock

as there were underwater lights in the pool. The onlookers alerted the event organisers to switch off power supply.

Some 2,000 people had turned up for the indoor celebration, Gulaal-19, organised by a private event management firm, which collected entry fee of ₹500 from everyone except children who were up to three and a half feet tall.

Witnesses said Naman and the three other children collapsed even as men and women were dancing in the water to film songs aired over huge speakers at the venue. The other children recovered soon after they were dragged out of the knee-deep water, but Naman had gone all stiff. Wittnesses were all praise for photojournalist Ravikumar for performing CPR on Naman. “I am trained in first aid skills including CPR. As soon as I did CPR, he began to respond and regain consciousness,” said Ravikumar said.

Once he recovered consciousness, Naman was rushed to a private hospital in Vepery. He was discharged in the evening, but doctors at the hospital refused to discuss what treatment had been done.

Naman’s mother said, “He is recovering. We did not know what happened to him then, but he suffered seizures.”

Soon after the news spread, the Vepery assistant commissioner, K Maheshwari, and a police team arrived at the spot and inspected the venue.

Officials at Vepery police station said Naman suffered seizures and that there was no incident of electric shock, pointing out that there were a lot of children, men and women in the small artificial pool at the time.

Witnesses were not willing buy the argument that the boy had suffered seizures, pointing out that three other children had also collapsed in the pool at the same time.

When TOI contacted the organisers, they denied any such incident had happened. “The child had a previous history of seizures and none of the others who were in the pool suffered any electric shock,” said one of the organisers, on condition of anonymity. So why did the children collapse? Was it an allergic reaction? Whatever it was, the organisers and the police were more intent that the show must go on, and it did.