Travelure
By Hugh & Colleen Gantzer
We have taken the title from a remark made by one of the many officials milling around the accident site where 41 labourers have been trapped. When asked how long it would take to rescue these workers, he replied that he could not give a date because they were engaged in “fighting the mountain”. This is the arrogant attitude that has brought about this disaster. The mountain he referred to is the world’s longest, highest and also the youngest range in the world. It has been growing for millions of years and it will continue to grow for millions of years longer. To believe that we humans can fight such an implacable force is the height of arrogance. We do not know who made this remark but it is typical of the attitude of those who decided to bore a tunnel through an enormous pile of rubble.
We have defined rubble in an earlier column and so we will try to describe it in more familiar terms. Imagine a ball of cottage cheese, paneer, liberally studded with walnuts, cashews and other hard dry fruit. This ball is hollow in the centre. It is held together only by its own lateral adhesion: its own stickiness. If you run a knife through, it you separate two sections of the paneer, the stickiness that held the two sections together is removed and, naturally, the paneer and its bedded dry fruit will be pulled by gravity. In all probability it will fall into the hollow in the centre. The paneer in, real life is the mud that holds the rocks together. The dry fruit represents the rocks.
If our comparison is wrong, we would like to be corrected. If it is right then every boring will endanger the trapped workers. The degree of danger will depend on the angle of the escape tunnel, the vertical tunnel being the most dangerous. Here we step back and find great relief in the presence of Arnold Dix.
So much for Arrogance. We now come to Ignorance. Was the construction company entrusted in this tunnelling aware of the fact that they had to cut through rubble? If they were not aware, who was responsible for keeping them ignorant of this fact? If they knew that they had been contracted to bore a tunnel through rubble, what was their expertise in undertaking such a task? Had they executed such a contract in the past? If they had done so, what was their track record? If they had not done so, or if their track record was either bad or suspicious, why were they awarded this contract? Most importantly, an escape tunnel should be an essential part of such a project. We understand that such an alternative safeguard had been included in the original contract. For some unknown reason this clause in the original contract was not fulfilled. If this escape route had been drilled, we would not have been subjected to the agony, or the international ridicule we face today.
Finally, the most obvious reason for allowing the contractor to take such life-endangering shortcuts can, most logically, be attributed to avarice. Avarice is a strong desire to have or keep money or possessions. It can also mean an excessive desire for gain. Avarice is also regarded as a sin and is always considered despicable and evil.
The four ancient Indic faiths of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Bon regarded such transgressions as offences reacting on the Wheel of the Law, the Dharma Chakra. From a more secular point of view, we believe that the collapse of the tunnel and our stupendous effort to save the entrapped workers has made headlines all over the world. Will this tarnish the image of a country that landed a Rover to sample the surface of the Moon and also to dazzle the world with our G20 success remains to be seen. Clearly, however, we did not have to hand our detractors such an opportunity to revile our land.
But then as Mahatma Gandhi said, “There is enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
(Hugh & Colleen Gantzer hold the National Lifetime
Achievement Award for Tourism among other National and International awards. Their credits include over 52 halfhour
documentaries on national TV under their joint names, 26 published books in 6 genres, and over 1,500 first-person articles, about every Indian state, UT and 34 other countries. Hugh was a Commander in the Indian Navy and the Judge
Advocate, Southern Naval Command. Colleen is the only travel writer who was a member of the Travel Agents Association of India.) (The opinions and thoughts expressed here reflect only
the authors’ views!).
