Brilliant writing. It highlights many of society's problems. > At one point, the grandson of a prominent politician (Shankar Dayal Sharma) waltzed in, chaperon

Brilliant writing. It highlights many of society's problems. > At one point, the grandson of a prominent politician (Shankar Dayal Sharma) waltzed in, chaperoned by a group of sidekicks and handlers. He had no reason to be there but quickly became the centre of attention. When asked what he was doing there, he smarmily replied, "Plane curiosity." The nihilistic tendencies of the political elite in India is well documented and yet nothing has changed in the intervening years. In fact, things are steadily getting worse. The powerful and rich, of course, flout rules and regulations as they will. > For at least 15 hours after the crash, there was little sense of sanctity about the site, which was only cordoned off much later. Some people rifled through the wreckage and corpses, trying to make off with the spoils. Yep. Respect for human life and basic human decency is severely lacking to put it mildly. > In the end, 94 bodies were charred beyond recognition or totally mutilated... Their families would hear about the tragedy only much later, particularly since some didn’t even know their relatives were on board. Others, perhaps, never found out at all, given the underhand manner in which agents and touts recruited people for jobs abroad. The extent of forced labour both at home in India and abroad is sickening. Many influential people, usually the manufacturers and builders and industrialists, benefit off of it. They probably have no regrets and simply turn a blind eye to this enormous human suffering and tragedy in favour of profits. > After 15 days in the morgue, the unclaimed bodies were divided in proportion to the Hindus and Muslims on board according to the passenger manifest, a compromise between community leaders following an initial dispute. Well, this had to happen. No Indian tragedy is complete without the age old, tried and tested, politically charged issue of Hindu-Muslim communal struggle. > At first, all eyes were on the ATC. Had VK Dutta made a mistake? That theory was stamped out quickly when the DGCA released control tower transcripts of the final conversations, suggesting that both pilots had acknowledged the instructions. Dutta was reinstated after a brief suspension. Imagine a hyper connected world where software engineers and executives were held to such high standards... > Within nine months of the collision, incoming and outgoing flights from Delhi were allotted dedicated paths by carving out some of the airspace previously controlled by the Air Force... AK Chopra, formerly of the DGCA, said, "We had been fighting for a secondary radar and separate corridors at the Delhi airport for months. We got them immediately after the accident." It is amazing how deliberately slow the government can be. Blame it on bureaucracy, corruption, or incompetence...the inefficiencies at every level are startling to say the least, and nothing gets done except when things are on fire. > "It was India that took the initiative to bring it [language requirements] to the ICAO assembly," said Captain Enrique Valdes on a Zoom call from the US. "India was the one that put it on the floor and was able to get the resolution to pass." ...There are no books about it [the crash]. There is little institutional recognition of India’s role in the events that followed. Casual (dare I say) racism, I guess. Taking the example of very recent times, I recall how Italy and Spain took all the media spotlight during the first wave of the 2020 pandemic... But now, all is forgotten when Brasil, India, and the others have it even worse. > "The human deaths in that plane crash did not evoke the same kind of horror or loss among the public," she [Natasha Badhwar, a journalist] said. "No one important had died. They had not been people like us." Indeed.