My good deed for the year 2006

On 30th December at 10:50 PM as I am sitting in my room in front of the TV and reading "Introduction to Algorithms", I hear a LOUD crashing sound in front of my house and rush downstairs to check out what happened. I see a stranger was lying down on the ground holding his left leg and besides him in the drain standing upright was a motorcyle. I went up to the man and asked him if he is ok. On enquiring he told me that his name was "Sarvanan", he is a "Tile worker" (the ones who lay tiles) and that he was riding under the influence of alcohol. He lost control and ended up crashing in the drain.

At this moment enters my neighbor "Seshadri" (who just returned from USA after completing his MS and was going back in a couple of days to start his PhD). I hadn't met him in over 2 years, so we meet look at each other say "Hi" and get to work taking the bike out of the ditch. The right side of the bike was completely totalled and after looking around we realized that the right side of the bike crashed into an electric pole before the bike ended up in the drain.

We asked him if he had a mobile phone (aka cell phone) so that he could call some relatives or friends. He said that he had given his mobile phone to his friend (What a bad time to give your mobile phone to your friend). He finally gave us a diary which had a couple of numbers. We dialled those numbers but no one at 11PM was lifting their phone. Finally someone lifted the phone and they did not know who Sarvanan was and we wasted like 5 minutes asking him if he knew who this guy was and if he could come over to take this guy home.

In the mean while another neighbor of ours kept asking the injured person whether he was driving fast and why was he driving fast, and I kept thinking "Hello... Can we do the root cause analysis later. We have an injured person here."
(With crimes on rise in cities and news channels showing us all the gory images of crime and deception we didnt know if we could trust this guy, but he looked hurt so we decided to help him)

For a moment we thought of calling the cops but then we didnt want the poor person to get into any more trouble than he already is in. He said that his friends lived in a one room shelter nearby, so we decided to drop him there and that they would take care of him. So I took out my car and we drove him to the place. The place was in a side road where the car could not enter to we carried him on our shoulders (like the injured soccer player who has too much pride to be stretchered of is carried). We started walking towards the room and he was telling me that he is married and if his boss finds out that he was drunk he might fire him or he would not be paid for some days. Definitely a sad story and for sure he was worried what would happpen to his family. So I just looked back at him and said, shouldn't you have thought about this when you were drunk and were riding a bike. But I guess he was too psyched out to understand what I said to him. But later he would realize it.

Finally we reached his room and started banging on the door. After 5 minutes of banging the door, his friends woke up and opened the door. Seshadri explained the situation to them in Tamil. We asked one of them to come with us to see where the bike is and also take its keys.

Finally at 12AM on 31st December 2006 the ordeal was over. Hope Sarvanan recovers soon and that next time he thinks a million times before he drinks and rides.

I am feeling good about helping out a person who needed help. It is a nice feeling, but I dont want you guys to fall in a ditch for me to have this nice feeling. Drive safe!!


PS: I almost forgot Harishh JP (my partner in crime for SQL injection attack on trendio and my partner in Kurukshetra) also met with an bike accident day before yesterday. He bruised his hands and legs. Wishing him too a speedy recovery!!


Yet another PS: Sadam was hanged today. Why was he hanged in such a hurry? My comments on it, COMING SOON!!!