From celebration to tragedy: all in a day's work

The Hindu

21 hours ago

There was victory in the air in Bengaluru on June 4. After a 17-year-long wait, the city's favourite franchise, Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), had clinched the trophy in the Indian Premier League (IPL) the previous night. The team was landing in Bengaluru from Ahmedabad, and a victory parade was being planned. For a city reporter, this meant a long day.
At around 10 a.m., the reporting team got on a conference call to plan the stories. We discussed how the city had not slept after the victory, how fans from the city had travelled to Ahmedabad to watch the final match, and how people on the Internet had created a thousand different memes and reels.
We also discussed threadbare how we would cover the proposed victory parade. We anticipated that the Central Business District (CBD), where our office is located, would be choked with vehicles from the afternoon as the victory parade was scheduled to begin after 3 p.m.
While loyal newspaper readers may be willing to wait for more than a day to read about the celebrations that unfolded that night in Bengaluru, online readers move on to other websites if the stories they are looking for are not uploaded on time. So, before leaving for office that morning, I filed some stories on the fan frenzy, describing how firecrackers had kept the skies aglow the previous night, people had danced madly on the streets, and bike rallies had kept everyone awake.
My plan was simple: get to office early, file the special stories for the day, and keep the evening free as a great deal of coordination was necessary for covering such a mammoth event. An army of interns was stationed at multiple points at the city to watch the parade pass by.
By around 1 p.m., fans clad in RCB colours begin to gather in CBD. I noted it down to draw a timeline later in the day. By 3 p.m., I finished filing three stories on the celebrations for online.
But shortly, the unexpected happened. As lakhs of fans gathered around the M. Chinnaswamy stadium and Vidhana Soudha, we first got the news that a woman had lost consciousness. Then, more bad news trickled in: a person had died due to a 'stampede-like situation'. My colleague immediately checked with her hospital sources and found that at least four people had died. Within an hour, seeing the raucous crowd, we knew that the numbers would climb into double-digits. It did not take too long for us to find out that 11 people had died, and most of them very young.
The mood quickly shifted in the newsroom, just as it did in the rest of the city. We decided that the stories of celebrations would no longer be reported for the print edition. I frantically called the interns one after another to make sure they were safe, and asked them to come back to office. All the reporters in the newsroom breathed a sigh of relief when the last intern made it back to the office.
Then it was the turn of senior reporters to fan out. One went to the stadium, another to the hospital near the stadium, and yet another to the mortuary at the government hospital.
After gathering inputs from multiple sources, colleagues, and eyewitnesses, I wrote a detailed story on how the celebrations quickly turned into a tragedy. I ended up drawing a timeline, but it was not the one I had planned earlier. There were steady developments. Reporters kept filing stories — about the chaos, the mismanagement, the panic, and the grief — without a break. They filed enough stories to fill nearly all the city pages.
At around 11 p.m., I was finally done with work. When I made my way back home, the air was heavy with mourning. The city, which had been alive with celebrations just 24 hours ago, had fallen completely silent.
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