The Great Escape!!!

I am back!!! After a longer-than-expected hiatus of close to five months (I sometimes wonder why I started this blog!!!), I am back to what I do worst - blog regularly. If my first four posts were intersticed by roughly three months, this fifth one comes after an even longer time - five months. I had experienced a strange, a rather weird feeling sometime around January (when roughly three months had elapsed since my 4th post). A feeling that almost willed me to write a fifth post but I somehow managed to kill the urge. But this fifth post holds a special pride of place not because it is the first one for the year but for the fact that it should not have been written; it should never have come about yet here I am writing it! Yes, if it wasn't for the miraculous escape I had on the road when I hoodwinked certain death, this blog would have died a poor death with just 4 posts. And I want to thank the Lord Almighty for "chipping in" just in the nick of time and bailing me and my friend out.

I was riding pillion with a friend on our way to the festive party thrown by the seniors in our hostel to celebrate their placements and in keeping with the rules of safe driving, were well within our lane. We were riding behind this bus and must have been doing 40 kph. The bus in front was rolling along at the same rate. And then the bus in front moved nonchalantly over to the left and the next microsecond, we realize why. It was making room for another bus - this one coming at us from the other side in the middle of a high-speed overtaking maneuver - and it had ALMOST made mincemeat of us before my dear friend jerked the bike to the left and made just enough room for the monstrous thing to pass by and as they say, we “escaped unscathed”. But boy, was it close or what!!! I saw the huge facade of the bus bearing down as it zoomed past us in a blink. Lucky for us my friend had the presence of mind and the reflexes to yank the bike just enough at the right time. And we were lucky there was no one behind us on our own lane to run us over as we twisted and turned our way to safety. We stopped on the side and tried to figure what had just happened. We had a hearty laugh about it but deep down, we knew we were a couple of feet away from being roadkill. And we spent the rest of the journey riding as far away from the middle of the road as we could!!!

And as before, I can only thank the Almighty for saving our hide and for saving this blog from being relegated to the virtual dustbins of history. This was a far cry from the typical miraculous escape routines that you get to hear and read where you have people trapped in a snowstorm for days on end or the boy from the slums who falls into a deep manhole and has to be rescued with great effort while he hangs on bravely. This was more "life or death", an ephemeral split-second that decides your fate one way or the other. And life is like that. That's all the time you have got sometimes. And as Al Pacino would say in Scent of a Woman, "You can live a life in a minute", so can a minute or a second decide your life.

As I round out, I am reminded of those hackneyed pieces of advice that you find on the inside covers of notebooks these days that go something like..."If you want to know the value of a month, ask a woman who has delivered a premature baby"..."If you want to know the value of a second, ask a person who has narrowly escaped an accident"... Well, I think you can ask me what a second feels like...