Yesterday Mr. Dhamankar came overe to collect his bill. A mild mannered gentleman, he is one of those rare beings who’d is truly content with life. And no he is not a 100 years old but my contemporary who still looks as though he’s passed out of Engineering College. As a civil engineer, Mr. Dhamankar gets to see parts of Mumbai which I can never hope to see like the top of Sukh Sagar a building at Hughes Road, where he had gone to fix the water tank which was on the terrace. He told us it took him all of 45 minutes to get there by bus from his house at Girgaon. Now at the best of times this distance of a mile and a half would have taken him 10 minutes by foot but as his shins were aching he decided to bus it. Since it was Saturday, he thought the buses would be empty and the roads emptier. How wrong he was!
Disaster management or disastrous management.
Bird’s eye view
It was the Saturday of the funeral of the recently departed Syedna and all his followers who were upward of a million people were literally out on the streets. Initially, the night before there was a stampede at the Syedna’s Malabar Hill residence where the mourners had come in the thousands to pay their respects to their leader. With just a narrow road leading to his house this was bound to happen. As Mr. Dhamankar put it, from Opera House till as far as his eye could see, there was no sign of road, it was absolutely covered with people standing shoulder to shoulder.This jam was all over South Bombay getting more dense towards the Crawford Market area where most of the Bohris live.
Ineptitude or Political Correctness?
The Syedna’s passing away was made known to all so I am amazed that the Bombay Police didn’t think they needed to make arrangements like diverting traffic making Public announcements about road congestion and generally regulating the flow of human movement on the road. As usual their excuse for their ineptitude was that they didn’t anticipate such crowds but surely they know how to deal with a crisis situation ?
After the Terrorist Attack of 26/11 our police and other governmental agencies were supposed to Hve undergone extensive training in Disaster Management. While mourners on the road is not a disaster surely this phenomenon is extraordinary and calls for more efficient management ? I wonder how many such unmanageable events will it take for our civic administrators to learn how to efficiently manage a crisis? Is it really ineptitude or is political correctness hampering their efficiency? Or is it sheer misunderstanding of the word disaster that prevented them from putting their disaster management training into action?
Whatever happened to technology?
Whatever it is,it is a shame that in this day and age when technology is so advanced and affordable that every citizen on the road has a mobile phone , the government can’t effectively handle crowds and has to watch “helplessly” as the city comes to a grinding halt!
Twenty- five Seven 
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