The chosen few: When a twist of timing meant life over death

Time of India

14 hours ago

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Patna: Justifying the old Biblical saying "No one can harm you, if God protects you," 40-year-old British national Vishwash Kumar Ramesh miraculously emerged unscathed from the recent AI 171 air crash in Ahmedabad, which claimed the lives of at least 274 people, including boarders of B J Medical College hostel.
While the world mourned, Ramesh walked out alive, a living enigma in the face of catastrophe.
His survival adds to the long and curious list of lone survivors – men, women and children – whose lives seemed to be cradled by fate in moments when death loomed largest.
At 8am on May 8, 1902, Mt Pelée in the French colony of Martinique roared to life, unleashing a firestorm that obliterated the thriving town of Saint-Pierre and its 30,000 residents in under a minute.
The sole survivor? Ludger Sylbaris, a convicted murderer locked in a tiny, poorly ventilated dungeon. Buried alive, he was found four days later, his groans echoing beneath the rubble. Burned but breathing, Sylbaris was pardoned and later hailed as "the man who lived through doomsday".
Then there was Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognised by Japan to have survived both atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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On Aug 6, 1945, he was in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. The next day, wounded but determined, he returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, only to experience another nuclear inferno. As he described the first blast to a sceptical boss, the second bomb exploded. Yet Yamaguchi lived to share his harrowing tale.
India, too, holds such haunting yet inspiring memories. During the devastating
Bhuj earthquake
of Jan 26, 2001, BSF personnel pulled an eight-month-old baby, Murtaza Ali, alive from the rubble, 81 hours after the tremors.
His forehead bore just a few scratches. His parents had perished, but fate had a different plan for him.
And then, there is Kusum Kumari, a 32-year-old woman from Bihar's Khagaria district. On Aug 19, 2013, she arrived at Dhamara Ghat with neighbours to visit the Goddess Katyayini temple. Her toddler son was asleep, so she delayed alighting from the train. Just minutes later, a speeding express train ploughed through the crowd on the opposite track, killing dozens.
"It was only a matter of a few minutes. While the express train crossed the other track, I could hear people wailing and crying. Emerging out of the train I saw only dead bodies strewn around," Kusum said. Her brief pause – instinctive, maternal and ordinary – had saved her life.
In every age and corner of the world, there are those who walk away from disaster untouched – proof, perhaps, that life sometimes bends its own rules.
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