No helmet, no protection

So, a woman constable in Chennai was triple driving a two-wheeler without a helmet and was fined Rs. 200/-. The justification for the paltry penalty was that the offence was in June of this year when the current, more stringent rules and penalties were not in force. But, shouldn't there be a premium for traffic infractions by police? Should they not be leading the citizens by their actions? Oh, you say, that is all such idealistic crap. OK, I won’t dispute that (does not mean that position is indisputable!). But, I'll let this slide, for the moment.

I live in Srirangam, a satellite town of Tiruchirappalli and let me give you a run down on what I have witnessed for the past more than a week, starting a few days after the current helmet law came into force. I walk about 600 meters to catch the college bus in the morning and get dropped off a little closer to home, about 400 meters, in the evening. In this 1,000 m total of walking along one of the main roads in the town, lasting no more than 11 minutes in total, I have counted helmet-less driving of motorized two-wheelers 27, 34, 15, 28, 52, 45, 37 times ... I stopped counting because it taxed my mental arithmetic capability.

With this small set of data points no computer can discern a pattern. But, I did, with some help from tennis.

In tennis, there was a time players took hardly anytime between points. But, there were some gamesmanship, by some players (mainly the “ugly American”, aka Jimbo, Jimmy Connors, the ultimate gamesmanship artist; and Ilie Nastase too) who deliberately took forever to start play after a point. It is to stop this practice a time limit between points was imposed. Now, what do you think happened? The games got longer. Now it is 25 seconds, not a second less, before the server tosses the ball in the air for her serve. Indeed, now the chair referee hardly imposes the 25 second rule unless it is egregiously violated.

So, what really happened was even those players who may have wanted to get on with the game waited for 25 seconds. The number of times bounced the balls increased to fill the time allotted. Just watch Djokovic’s pre-serve ritual and you would understand what I mean. One version of Murphy’s Law I have heard is that a task will expand itself to fill the time allotted to it! This is a fit case to be given as a rule. Steffi Graf proves the rule by being its exception!

Something similar may be happening with the helmet rule. Without the rule, those who wanted to be safe and be on the safe side of law were wearing it. Now, with the rule and with so many people violating it, even those who were safety conscious must feel like sissies and must have discarded their helmets. That is, the law, by not being studiously enforced, has had precisely the opposite effect on the behavior of motorists from what was intended. Now, the parallel between the helmet rule and the 25 second rule in tennis stands established.

Again, going back to the woman constable, why wouldn't a non-police citizen demand that he be given concession on the quantum of fine? Something to think about. Now, that is a slippery slope with no exit ramps. Where would you put the exit ramp?

Giving exemplary punishment to a few who are merely unlucky to get caught is a non-starter.

Yes, I am going to sound truly heartless – scrap the rule. Advertise widely that citizens are at their own risk if while riding (or pillion riding) a two-wheeler without a helmet get into an accident no matter who caused the accident. Their treatment (including the cost) will not be underwritten by civil society. Insurance policies are notorious for their nano-scale conditionalities. Add a few in respect of helmet-less driving.

No helmet, no protection.

Raghuram

The helmet connection

It is in the context of Phil Hughes’s death I was reminded of an accident about two decades ago involving a two-wheeler, two riders, one helmet and the then infamous Red Line buses that plied the roads of Delhi. Late by a minute or so, a young lad from the apartment directly beneath the one I was residing in rushed to the bus stop to go to college. He missed the bus and just then he saw someone riding a motorcycle come out of the apartment block in front of the bus stand. He thumbed for a ride and he was duly offered one to anywhere enroute where he can catch a bus. That was a fateful ride.

The driver was wearing a helmet and the pillion rider was not. That was the one helmet I referred to earlier. As the story unfolds, a couple of kilometres away the motorcycle was hit from the rear by a Red Line bus and both the riders fell off the vehicle and hit the road. The driver, with the helmet on escaped with no injury whereas the unfortunate college student who was on the bike and who was merely on it for a ride died on the spot, head injury. The Red Line bus did not run over him or anything like that.

Let us trace the culpability, in multiples and at various levels, for this incident, establishing or otherwise parallels with the Phil Hughes’s case. The Red Line bus, of course. A slight parallel may be established with Sean Abbot, if one is ungenerous to the bowler. The bus was not going on about its duty as the bowler was. It was not following the rules as the bowler was. After all, the bus hit the two-wheeler from behind. But, the ultimate result is the same – loss of a life.

Next, the driver of the two-wheeler. Going by the reports, he was not riding recklessly. He was trying to be a Good Samaritan, by offering a ride to someone in need. But, here comes the crucial question, should he have offered a ride knowing full well he does not have an additional helmet for the pillion rider? My heart and mind are working at cross purposes here. My heart says, no, the driver is not culpable on this score, but my mind rebels, though it acknowledges the large “chance” component in the whole incident. The incident is not quite a “Black Swan” but definitely it tends towards grey. Why venture into that area is the question my mind probes.

When you try to find a parallel with the Phil Hughes incident, the only conclusion will be to proscribe bowling short-pitched and rising deliveries. A cricket match but no bouncers. That is, no helmets, no riding on a two-wheeler.

Third, what about the culpability of the victim himself? As a young man going to college he must have been aware of the importance, indeed the criticality of wearing a helmet while riding on a two-wheeler. He, then, took a chance and made his family pay the price. I am not being cold hearted, please understand.

Translating this to cricket incident, are we to conclude that batsmen should merely run away from a rising delivery? That is, does Phil become culpable by merely standing his ground? The parallel fails miserably in the context of the existing rules, of the road and the game.

So, I say, Phil Hughes was hardly culpable for his fate, whereas the pillion rider was marginally more so. The rules of cricket are perhaps at a higher level of culpability but in trying to dilute this, people who love the game will strip it off one of its, indeed any sport’s, essentialities – intimidation. The rules of the road are very clear but lax implementation is very definitely responsible. I dare say the pillion rider, or his family, would have happily paid the fine if their son’s life would have been spared.

Is there a parallel between the Red Line bus and Sean Abbot? Definitely not. Abbot played by the rules and stands fully acquitted. Even had the fatal bouncer was illegal from the point of view of the number of such deliveries per over, the penalty if a “free delivery”, which I am sure Abbot would have been willing to bowl, as he has made his point of intimidation.

But, even after failing to establish the parallel on three counts/personalities, I claim on the whole there is one commonality – helmets. A better designed helmet may have saved Hughes’s life, and refusing to get on a two-wheeler without a helmet would have saved the student’s life. Better implementation of the existing rules, besides educating pillion riders (including women) would have saved the life of the student.

I venture to guess that there are millions more helmet-less two-wheeler drivers than there are cricket players around the world. If you remember, Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn went around streets of Rome on a Vespa scooter without helmets! That scene should be shown to all these millions sending out the message that doing the same is injurious to your life, a la cigarette smoking or tobacco chewing is.

This is the helmet connection and how Phil Hughes incident can find social relevance beyond the rarefied atmosphere of cricket.

Raghuram Ekambaram

Helmets and two-wheelers

A road accident, involving a motorbike and a mere two people, how did it come to occupy a reasonably prominent place, front page, in a generally non-sensational paper like The Hindu? This was the question that led me to read the news item bylined “Staff Reporter” [1].

OK, this is not as ordinary as I initially thought. This was a case of a motorcycle hitting the side rails of a flyover and the riders falling of the elevated structure and landing on the ground below. Still not too sensational, would you not say?

OK, there is more. The driver of the vehicle sustained “severe head injuries and has been declared brain dead.” What happened to the pillion rider? “The woman fled while she was being taken to the hospital in an autorickshaw.”

Yet, there is some obvious important news buried in the report that does not come out. That is the pity.

The report does not say whether the driver of the two-wheeler and the pillion rider were wearing helmets. Now, how would this accident go into the records? Will the head injury of the driver be attributed to his not wearing a helmet? It should be. But, one may ask, then how did the pillion rider escape such consequences. One can be passé about it and mention that she was lucky to have fallen on the roof of a Chennai Corporation jeep. For me, that just will not do. The city cannot afford to keep its vehicles parked at strategic locations just so a wayward motorcyclist will fall of his/her two-wheeler and will be rescued.

The point I really want to make is this: the current instance deserves to be on the front page of the newspaper but only to show the likely outcomes of not wearing a helmet. The headline itself must have conveyed the message in a capsule and the report suitably tailored to drive the point home.

The Hindu failed to tap this opportunity to educate its readership.

Raghuram Ekambaram

References

1.    Biker, pillion fall off flyover, The Hindu, August 6, 2014, (Tiruchirapalli) {http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/chen-crime/biker-pillion-fall-off-flyover/article6284873.ece}