Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Presence of Mind..

The other day I was going on a bike (as a pillion) on inner ring road, and an speeding red maruti overtaked me and banged in to the Tempo traveler right in front of me, which resulted in tempo traveller overturning and falling in to the ditch next to the road. Further a biker in front of me flew off from his bike and again fell in to the same ditch. All this happened in a just about couple of seconds.

Surprisingly nothing happened to the people in the maruti, except that the front of the car got damaged, but the car was still in driving condition.

After the shock of some ten seconds, I just got off to try to help the biker guy who suffered the biggest injury in this full incident, but by the time there were already lot of people who had started helping. And I realized that I was not doing much of value add there, other than to add more commotion, so I left.

In this confusion the maruti guy vanished, and then I was wondering why did not have the presence of mind to note the number of the speeding maruti. I was someone who had the best view of the full incident. Forget about pen and paper, I could have just taken the photo of the number plate with my camera enabled mobile. But it never occurred to me.

I was wondering if this presence of mind is the inbuilt talent some people have or this is gained by experience? Some people around me are amazingly good at that to do the right things at the right time, wasting no additional time. And seemingly things don't occur to me that fast.

I just hope that the biker guy is safe and surviving.

8 comments:

Alistair D'souza said...

see ... you did what you're instincts told you to do... i.e. help someone... which is the type of person you are... that was of higher priority to you and you probably didn't even think that the maruti guy would run away... so you never thought of taking the number down...

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

I concur with alistair. Relieving someone's pain was more important to you than inflicting punishment on someone. That indeed reflects the type of person you are. Of course, this is NOT to say that the act of penalizing the guilty and ensuring that a similar offence is less likely to occur, is of any less significance.

Anonymous said...

I agree :),though it would have been great if you had noted that guy's number.Its sad that the guy in the car didnt step out to help.

Rashmi

Anonymous said...

It shows what kind of a person you are... to help someone in pain first & then do the rest.

Yes, it happens with most of us but I also agree with you that somewhere we are lacking that presence of mind. At least one person should have noted down the no. The contribution thus made, would have been equally good on his/her part.

Cuckoo

Goli said...

@alice, @pulkit: ya, but there were some 5-6 seconds where I was carefully looking at the maruti guy to see his reaction. and I had the mobile phone in hand with me and somehow it never occured :).

@Rashmi: Generally they would run away yaar. Because there is huge fear of getting beaten.

@Cuckoo: Yups it was generally surprising to me that the first instinct of lot of people was not to confront the maruti guy.

Chander Dogra said...

this might sound a region biased comment, buit actually its not. Had it been my hometown which happend to be in north india. the maruti guy would have been roughed up. Are we IT folks in Bangalore too soft?

Unknown said...

Presence of Mind - It's Practice/experience :)