Prof shoots mishap on film

MUMBAI: Mishaps and knockdowns on the suburban railway system are a sad but inexorable part of commuting life in the city. But in perhaps the first such recording of its kind, an accident, along with the concomitant blood shed and the Mumbaikar’s apathy, has been shot live on a video camera.
When forty three-year-old Baldev Raj, a professor of marketing, ventured out of his home with his video camera on Thursday afternoon, little did he know that he would be an eyewitness to—and a recorder of—a tragic accident.Having replaced the pencil batteries of the camera, he decided to test it on his way to work by filming the scenes at Wadala railway station.
According to Mr Raj, the 2.42 p.m. train from Bandra to CST scheduled to arrive at platform no. 3 was running late by about three minutes.
Meanwhile, another train from Panvel, which was also headed for CST, arrived on platform no.4. A passenger later identified as Rajesh Suryavanshi (35), who was waiting on platform no. 3, apparently wanted to jump down, cross the tracks and catch the train on platform no. 4.
However, he was unaware of the approaching train on his platform and in an instant had been knocked down. The next frame of the film that Mr Raj shot shows the victim sprawled on the platform in a spreading pool of blood with not a single commuter coming to his aid.
In fact, among the apathetic onlookers seen in the film is a man standing with his hands folded and watching the blood flow. Mr Suryavanshi, who works in a private company at Nariman Point, has been admitted to the Lokmanya Tilak Hospital at Sion.
“He is in a coma and his condition is quite serious,’’ a hospital staffer said. According to a neighbour in Kalyan,Mr Survanshi has two sons aged eleven and seven. Asked why he did not try to warn Mr Raghuvanshi or render assistance himself, Mr Raj told TNN that the “whole thing happened in a split second and I did not realise that I was shooting an accident live.’’
As for rendering assistance, he said, “I did ask a shoeshine boy to contact the station master and get assistance. Only after I saw some railway personnel reach the scene with a stretcher did I board the next train.’’ Inder Singh, the motorman of the train that knocked Mr Raghuvanshi down, insisted that he had not spotted Mr Suryavanshi.
“I did not even know that my train had knocked down anybody,’’ he said. But Sharad Kumar, secretary of the Wadala Citizens’ Forum, who is following up the matter, said the video clip made it clear that Mr Singh had sufficient time to at least blow the horn if not apply the emergency brakes.
Strangely, the guard of the train, Anthony Clifford, also did not see the bleeding passenger lying on the platform.
V.T. Koshy, a senior railway official said, “As per our procedure, whenever a motorman or a guard finds that somebody has been fatally knocked down, they remove the body from the tracks and alert the railway staff at the next station. If they find an injured person, they provide first-aid and take him or her to the next station and alert the staff concerned. We never leave a injured passenger unattended.’’
But this is exactly what did not happen on Thursday. The motorman claims he did not see the injured man, the guard also apparently did not notice him and what is worse is that the motorman and guard of the next train also did not notice him!