Are You Not Worthy of Living a Life?

Please don’t risk the lives of others if you don’t respect yours

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

I haven’t planned to write this article. And I was living my life just like any other person on this earth. The mind was happy and the heart healthy.

But then I saw and heard something, then again something similar, and again something more similar, and then I realised I have been seeing these things for a long time in very different circumstances, except that this time I am more focused on it. This time it caught my mind.

It was a piece of news that caught my eye. It was around 4 or 5 AM in my city, and two guys were going to the vegetable market on their two-wheelers, just as they would go every day; nothing was new for them, just that they didn’t know they wouldn’t be coming back home again. As they were going their normal way, an overspeeding car came out of nowhere and bam, slammed into their two-wheeler, and you know the result.

A few days later, an Instagram reeler from the same city who would post videos of speeding in cars and doing random stunts was killed in a car accident when his stunt went wrong.

Then something very similar happened in another city as well. There as well, someone lost their life due to the negligence of another.

Now, before these two instances, there were a few more of the same pattern, and in most cases, the one who got slammed died. The car driver or the people inside the car only died when the car slammed into a rock, a wall, or a footpath.

I only have one query for them: if you don’t respect your life, at least respect others? You might think it’s fine if you die doing stunts or over-speed, but this is not the case for everyone else. You want to die? Die; don’t take anyone else with you.

Or at least, before going on such unknown suicide missions, think about your own family back home. They would never send you on such missions.

Now, all that news wasn’t new to me, or anyone else. When we open the newspaper, there is always one or two such types of news. And just one or two because the news covers only a few in their paper. And that also in a small piece, somewhere in the corner of the page, and in the middle of the paper.

Even the news outlets have realised by now that this is everyday news, let’s just leave a small space for them. And we can’t blame them.

Now the important question is, what can we do about this? The answer is very simple: nothing. Even if we decide, “ohh okay, now I am not going to do any sort of stunts or overspeeding”, still, who’s going to stop the others?

Once at a petrol pump, when I gave a lift to an old man for a short distance, he gave me very valuable advice…

“When you drive on the road, always think you are the only one who can see; assume everyone else on the road is blind. So you have to be careful of every action of yours as well as theirs.”

And most innocent people who die in an accident are the result of someone else’s entertainment.

Once, a police officer told my brothers and a few others, when they were paying a fine at an RTO for offences such as no helmet, no licence, etc. These were supposedly his words…

“Try to imagine this, it’s a festival, and we are on duty to avoid any untoward incidents, and then something happens to someone on road, and then we have to knock on his family’s door, who are deeply rooted in celebration and tell them, your son died in an accident. This is the one of the toughest part of the job. All because one of you didn’t followed the traffic rules, or one of you didn’t value your life or the other person’s life worthy enough of living”

Again, we have no answer to this. But for everyone out there on the road, think twice and thrice before you perform unnecessary stunts on the roads.

Reaching late is better than never reaching.

And everything is second to family. Think about them. And think about others as well.

There’s always someone waiting for everyone of us.