What lies in a day? You leave your home for the anarchy of a bustling Indian city and factor in the chances of being crushed under the wheels of a speeding vehicle, falling and dying in a manhole or being trampled under the feet of other insecure lives on a foot over-bridge. You still go out and you count yourself reasonable when you return home unscathed while you actually are plain lucky. On any given day in any Indian city, there are a few people who aren’t lucky.That number just got concentrated today on the bridge between the busy Parel and Elphinstone Road local train stations in Mumbai– 22 dead, 30 wounded, scattered footwear and a few dead faces surprised by running out of luck with the city too soon . By now, you know what to dread in your evening news capsule, and more so tomorrow when reasonable risk-takers throng the same bridge- the imbecility of a cliché called ‘spirit of Mumbai’.You may be wondering what a farmer does the day following a massacre in village or what a vendor does in one of the many markets in Delhi the day after a bomb blast.

In a country where life is cheap, the urban space is more likely to send daily reminders of your insignificance- stopping probably at your death only. There is an understated acceptance of that insignificance- something that lends a sense of banality to tragedies you witness merely ten metres from you or on your television screen. So what if they are dead going to workplace, don’t’they die while going to their native places for festivities?

Another image from another railway station 13 years back- platform, not bridge. Stampede killed five people, and left many injured while they were boarding the Patna-bound Sadbhavna Express at New Delhi Railway station in 2004. Most of them were going to join their families for Chhath festival.Six years later in 2010, another stampede claimed two lives and injured 15 passengers when “a last minute change of platform for a Patna-bound train triggered a stampede at the New Delhi railway station, facing summer rush”.

Stampedes, on their own way, are a desperate expression of people responding to their everyday insecurities in a life, not different from state of nature, is “nasty, brutish and short”. In all this bid to hinge to their lives, they are convinced of their insignificance. It’s a type of insecurity which makes jostling a reflex action in any space filled with people in India. A conditioned response which makes you push at the only person at the gate of a Metro coach, hoping to have a few inches to stand or even the privilege of a seat. It’s a space where everyone is a rival, a co-claimant on things you know have a fleeting and unsure ownership. No one is welcome, all suspects.

What, however, the ritual of blame game would come down to is predictable in a civic culture where the state is the primary arbiter of the sense of ‘public’. The structural strength of over-the-foot bridge at Elphinstone Road station, the questions about deployment of police for crowd management at New Delhi railway station and other administrative and infrastructural concerns are valid but not at the cost of overlooking the role that citizen- versus- citizen duel has in triggering such tragedies. While the efficiency of state delivery pitted against the citizen security will always be a valid and attractive narrative in a democracy, the everyday experience of urban India pits your fellow citizen against you in violent theatres which range from rash driving to brawls and from road rage to stampede on staircases and bridge, of course.

Our atomistic existence as filling up for numbers in an increasingly alienating world, where we are getting convinced of our own insignificance, have also blurred lines of individual morality in public space or any yearning for a human contract of living. We aren’t surprised when an accident victim, lying unattended on road, gets robbed of his mobile phone and money or even bleeds to death, not without being robbed, of course. We delude ourselves with expectations from wings of governance controlling multiple rogues that float within our individualities, living under unrealistic ideas of ‘preventive’ policing.

The site of current tragedy, Mumbai, has been for decades evoking feeling of people abandoned to their own devices- an acceptance that its fate and tragedies alike would be largely scripted by people as insecure as in any part of the country. A feeling even Suketu Mehta couldn’t escape in his work, Maximum City – “Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us!’’.

We all find out what our anxious urban selves can do one day- how we react to a rumour of a blast ( there is no reason why we shouldn’t), what we would actually see a co-claimant of a train seat or someone trying to get ahead of us on a crowded bridge. We would come across as uglier than the sane selves with which we target the abstract extension of our possibilities as well as failures- the state. In a day, perhaps we discover the primary sanity- self-interest, the only credible ideology, in a hostile world trying to deny us our inch of space. In discovering that, we pit ourselves against all, and all against us. That’s what a stampede is- a sum of all our reflex action against all that can go wrong- citizen vs. citizen.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26.