The last day of my life??? Thankfully not
Cant seem to avoid drama, can i? However for once, this could have been true. Let me start from the very beginning.
It was Saturday, the 25th of august, 2007. Had a decent day in class tho cant remember much about it. Sadly or not so sadly that has become the way I look at class now. Something that has to be attended and endured. The real life starts only post class. And I cant seem to recollect what happened two days ago in class. One reason for that is also that I sleep a lot in lectures. Virtually every lecture. Tho only lecture where it is not allowed is in the maths class which is taken by a prof popularly called BABA. He it seems gives F grade to anyone found sleeping or talking in class. His terror is so great that u can hear a pin drop in his lectures. Unfortunately he teaches us like we r school kids. Saying things like “2 into x equals 2x. any doubt? Have u understood?”
Anyways this is not about my classes. At 4 that evening we had an event called Finrush. It was a treasure hunt organized by Special Interest Group in Finance(SIGFI)(one of 22 committees). U had to solve accounting and economics questions and the reasons would be numbers that would lead you to certain rooms where there were even more questions. So on and so forth till u got to the treasure. Now the reason why I am going into such detail about the event is because I WON THE EVENT. Yes. Actually came first. Finished it before anyone else. And then there was a huge ruckus because some of the questions to other teams(did I mention that I was a part of a team of 3 ppl) were wrongly printed and led them to rooms where there were no questions. But still we did finish it really quickly and I think we would have won the event anyways.
So later that night we decided to celebrate by going for a movie which I have been desperately wanting to watch. The only movie I have watched in a theatre since I have been here is Simpsons and we really wanted to watch any movie and none of us had watched Chak De India. So Chak De India it was to be. We were also feeling a lil rebellious so decided to go for the 10 30 pm show even tho everyone has to be back at the campus by 11pm. That rule is not really enforced so it would not have been a problem anyways. So we started towards the city at 9. 4 of us on 2 bikes. The hopeless thing about roads leading to the city are that there are absolutely no street lights on the road for a large part of the way. I mean they are there but for some reason they are never on.
A little bit of background to help u appreciate the gravity of the situation. We were on 2 bikes. Sandeep was riding an old Pulsar 150cc and I was sitting behind him. Raghu was riding a new Pulsar 200cc and Naveen was sitting behind him. Raghu’s bike being new could not cross 60kmph speed and he did not know the way also. So Sandeep who knows the way and usually goes at a speed of around 80kmph had to go slowly. And the headlights of his bike were barely enough to allow us to see a few feet ahead of us. So we were going all the more slowly, at somewhere arnd 40 kmph. Sandeep was ahead and raghu was behind(as it obviously should have been coz he knew the way). A few kms from the campus, we were going comfortably on the main road(very decent road), when suddenly I saw a huge thing lying in the middle on the road. Because of the darkness and the not so great headlights, we saw it just when it was only a few feet away from us. The “it” was a huge bull lying dead smack in the middle of the road. There was absolutely no time and distance to break, so Sandeep (being an old hat at biking) managed to slow down and turn just enough so that we went over one of its legs. And its hoofs came off as if it was a stick being broken. However, raghu and naveen were very close to us and they could not see why we had turned so suddenly so they just slowed a lil. But not enough to enable them to avoid the bull. Now another strange thing was that someone had placed bricks just before the bull. When we went over the bull, the first thing I did was look behind. And I saw the other bike hitting the bricks and skidding off the road. It did not leave me time to feel sick over having gone over a dead bull. Raghu and naveen fell off the bike and the bike went on ahead and landed on the body of the bull.
We immediately stopped and rushed to them. Thankfully they were not hurt too badly at least from what they said and whatg we could see. The right side of both of them was badly scratched and they bleeding profusely. Now both me and naveen cant ride bikes so Sandeep took raghu on his bike to the nearest hospital which thankfully was only a hundred meters away(a pretty shabby one but who cares). In the meantime I called Bharat and Puneet to come with both their bikes. I also called up Vami or I think she called then. Any which way I wanted to hear her voice which I did. But I am afraid I could not give her a lot of details then which led to her being very tensed for an hour. I know she cursed me a lot for that. Sorry. Bharat and puneet turned up very quickly and we all went to the hospital. Naveen just had superficial cuts but raghu had to take three stitiches on his knee cap to stem the bleeding. And to our surprise there was already one second year student there who had fallen over the same dead bull half an hour ago and was all bandaged. And he had an exam the next day. We were furious over three students getting hurt over one bull and called up the media cell of our institute. They told us to
get pics which I did on my cell but dint use it then.
By then raghu told us that he dropped his gold ring there so I and bharat went back to look for it. And wonde of wonders, street lights had turned on in just that 50 metres stretch of the road where the bull was. We felt so angry at the local body. A few locals then dragged the bull to one side of the road. We could not find the ring so went back after searching for 15 min.
Now, 3 days after the incident, everything is back to normal for me. Naveen nd raghu are still limping. It could have easily been the last day of my life had we been going at Sandeep’s usual speed. But luckily I am safe with not a scratch on me. Unfortunately my friends were not so lucky. Maybe I still am the luckiest person on earth.
P.S. The bull in the photo was lying on the middle of the road. this is the position after it was moved.
