The New Nation - Internet Edition

Maswood Alam Khan

Captivated by birds and airplanes in flight in our childhood we slaked our wish of flight by hand-launching a paper-plane made of folded papers with wings and a fuselage designed on aerodynamic principles that glided in the air like a real-life aircraft---warming the cockles of our baby hearts.

Travelling in an aircraft does not really fulfil our mythical wish to fly on our own wings unless we ourselves can fly the aircraft as its captain. But, not everybody can afford to be a member of the flying club to become a pilot. And not every qualified pilot has an aircraft of his own parked at his backyard always ready to lift him up high into the sky whenever he fancies.

Flunking our attempt to pilot an aircraft sitting on its cockpit we then as adults satiated our longing to be a 'bird in flight' on an alternative mode: we drove our cars holding the steering wheel, shifting the transmission gears, pressing the accelerator and pushing the brakes while focusing on the road ahead---like an eagle hovering in the azure sky focusing on preys in quest for her food. The speed, altitude, centrifugal forces, and sensations of flying that we experience while driving our cars let us feel what it is like to be a bird or an aircraft pilot in flight. This partly explains why we love our cars, preferring this mode of locomotion to that of walking or running for which we are genealogically adapted.

Birds of prey, whose survival hinges on swiftness and who live in deep forests and earn their living by chasing down other birds and insects, have very high 'flicker fusion frequency' enabling them to react quickly when moving at high speed---an ability achieved through an evolutionary process driven by survival necessity for thousands of years---compared to humans, whose evolution did not necessitate a fast flicker fusion frequency like that of birds, nor did their evolution presage that they would have to piggyback in future on a very fast vehicle to run or fly faster than a bird. So, when we drive our cars like a flying bird, we are a fish out of water. We abscond from our natural bipedal habit for an airborne one in which we are at times out of control.We are genetically designed to walk or run on the locomotive strength of our two legs. So, when we get behind the steering wheel of a car, we may think we have gained a bird's power of flight---a dangerous psychological illusion on the part of a human driver, if s/he is not properly educated, trained, governed, controlled and overseen. Likewise, the lady dog Laika---the first animal launched into orbit---was not expected to while away her time inside the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik-2 on her own without having undergone any training and without any remote controls from the ground station.

Pathetically, most of the motor vehicle drivers in our country are lesser trained and lesser medically screened for their ability to cope with speed than Laika, the lady dog who underwent series of trainings and medical checkups before she was harnessed with gears for her maiden journey into space.

Hundreds of our drivers embark upon their dreams to drive a truck to earn a livelihood at a minor age when they were supposed to learn lessons from schools and morals from guardians. Their prime time for games in playgrounds and for lessons inside classrooms is thus lost in the smoggy and slimy environment of trucks and buses belching out leaden fumes and truckers smiting them with spiteful scolds and unholy gestures. The first chapter of their driving lessons begins with "massaging feet, hands, back and head of their 'ustad' (master driver) when he prepares to go to sleep. The next are washing the truck, screaming warnings to drivers of other competing vehicles and doing his ustad's personal errands.

With tortuous experience on massaging human limbs, cleansing body parts of motor vehicles, and screaming nasty scolds at fellow motorists the 'helper-turning-into-driver' is suddenly ordained as a full-fledged driver---on a day when his ustad is a little tired and does not feel like driving. The new driver is now behind the wheel of a truck. He is now in the pilot's seat of a jumbo jet with turbofan engines. Speeding up is now his passion being continuously fuelled by his fantasies pent-up in a cocoon of dreams he has been knitting since the day he started his apprenticeship under the tutelage of his ustad! His dream to fly has at last come true.

The new driver was too preoccupied all his childhood with his dreams of driving to go to a school. He could not learn from a teacher the values of human empathy for another driver seeking a passage on the right side of his speeding truck. Neither could he afford time to read a story with a moral or hear words from a leader with a message that could instil into his embryonic mind a dose of patriotism. Following in his ustad's footsteps his next dream is to own a truck by his extra savings---every time by overloading the already overloaded cargo of the day.

His ustad has categorically instructed him to maintain his truck's equilibrium by driving just on the middle of the road straddling the dividing white line, may what come---left-hand or right-hand driving is none of his business! A little deviation from the middle point of the highway for any allowance given to any passing vehicle, he has been repeatedly warned, will endanger his truck, imperil his new career and shatter his dreams because his hyper-overloaded truck---now precariously on a balance on the flat surface of a road---would invariably turn turtle if it has to veer onto the slightly-sloped sideways of the road or the highway. Colliding side-on or head-on with a tiny car, to him, is far safer than sacrificing the middle path thereby losing his job or his life.

Every single citizen of our country and every single individual of our police force know and see everyday that trucks with capacity of carrying 5 tons of cargo are regularly hauling 400 large-sized sacks (each to hold 2.5 maunds of rice) fully stuffed with paddy or rice which constitutes a truckload weighing 1000 maunds or 37 tons which is 7.5 times more than its optimum capacity, thanks to indigenous modifications doctored to its load bearing power by trebling or quadrupling the sets of leaf springs that are vital for balancing loads of a vehicle---a dangerous tempering to compromise with the original architectural and mechanical designs of the truck.

We don't know whether cracks developed on the Jamuna Bridge were caused by such overloaded hauling. Neither have we known how many thousands of lives or how much tons of money could have been saved if the regulatory or the law enforcement body could only resist their temptations of not paying any heed to those tempered leaf springs that are very much visible at the underneath of the chassis of a truck.

Thanks to my pretty long driving experience I can empathise with a driver steering his tiny 800 CC Suzuki car vis-à-vis with a trucker driving his gigantic TATA lorry on the same road or highway: both are drivers with equal rights under law; but with laxity of law enforcement in our country and complete absence of proper licensing, medical checkups, training and education of our drivers one finds himself as a sparrow and the other a sparrowhawk.

We humans differentiate ourselves as rational beings living in a civilized society compared to other animals roaming on the wild. Yes, it is true when we are rightly educated and trained under proper leadership. An uneducated or untrained driver steering his truck in an environment not controlled by strictures of law and order is far worse than a hyena in a jungle. Hyenas don't kill another hyena to quench their hunger; but we humans do indulge in homicide, fratricide, matricide, parricide or patricide even for fun if there is no one to look over our shoulders to stop the crime.

Speed has become the driving force in our lives. Everyone is in a hurry-to get to work, to unload a cargo, to get home, to drop off the kids, to pick them up, to get to the market. We must go ever faster, and we build our cars ever stronger to protect us in the reckless chase for money and status not knowing that the truck near our car is a time bomb ticking away as the metal liner of its CNG cylinder has already frayed out and is about to give way to a slight concussion.

Thousands of people in our country are falling prey everyday to our love for speed, shoddy brakes, adulterated lubricants, CNG gas cylinders made of fatigued metals, spurious replacements of vital parts, laxity of traffic law, faulty/no traffic signal and unbridled behaviour of unruly, untrained and drunken drivers driving defective and unscientifically modified vehicles on our dilapidated and poorly maintained roads and highways.

According to the Accident Research Centre (ARC) of BUET thirty-two people are killed everyday on the roads of our country and according to Red Cross & Red Crescent Society three thousand people (including 500 children) are killed everyday on the roads of the world. This amounts to 1.2 million deaths a year. In addition, more than 50 million people are seriously injured on roads every year; many are disabled for life.

World report of 2004 jointly published by World Bank and World Health Organization cried for taking immediate measures to check road crashes in poor countries as it predicted that fatalities on roads will fall by 20 percent in high-income economies like in USA and rise by 80 percent in low-income economies like in Bangladesh in the coming years, if we fail to follow what the developed countries are doing to reverse the trend of road mishaps.

Hundreds of road mishaps are not heard about even by local people of the area where the road crashes are taking place in our country. Only a very few are reported in the news media and fewer are recorded by the police or the statistician and no follow-up story of a handful of those reported crashes is ever published in any newspaper as to plights of the victims left in the lurch: their groans in hospitals or hunger of the children who became orphans. As if, victims dying of road crashes and mosquitoes getting asphyxiated by aerosol insect sprays are of the same gravity and of the same magnitude.

If traumas and tribulations of those crash victims were published in news media in serials the way a single mishap of Rimi murder case (thanks to Rimi's status of a daughter of a journalist as an additional weight) was highlighted in the press years back, perhaps there could have been an earthquake of public opinions to compel our government to right all the wrongs on the roads or the nerves of the reckless drivers could perhaps have been calmed enough not to fly their cars at supersonic speed or ram their trucks on the wrong sides of the roads or hurtle their buses onto the rail track when the speeding train is only a few yards away.

Next time when you are in a hurry to overtake a speeding truck, look out for the space on the right or on the left of the juggernaut and count moments begging the Providence for another chance to live a little more of life as you don't know when the mountain of its sky scraping load would tip on the roof of your car or when its CNG gas cylinder would detonate or when another truck or a bus or a train of the same status is to swoop on you!