Some memories remain etched in mind. Many years ago, a news report caught my attention partly because of the headline “Providential escape”, but largely, I think, it was because of the event itself. A bus carrying the employees of a company crashed through the railings of a railway overbridge and landed itself miraculously, right way up, on the railway tracks some 20-25 feet below. No train was passing by, when the bus fell and except for some minor injuries to a few, the bus and its passengers had what can only be termed a providential escape.
I remember another story I read. A boy and a girl of a middle-class English family wanted to go on a ship to America, but sadly knew that their father could ill afford such a costly voyage. One day, the man surprised his wife and children by coming home with ship tickets for all of them. Just a few days before the trans-Atlantic voyage was to begin, the boy was bitten by a dog and required rabies vaccination. The travel agent conveyed to the father that the family’s tickets were being cancelled as they could not risk other passengers to any infection. The entire family was distraught. A month later came the tragic news that the ship in which the family were to go, The Titanic, had sunk. What was it that saved the family? Was it the hand of providence or merely a coincidence?
There are many examples in life where the ‘kiss of death’ all but gets delivered. During a trip to Himachal Pradesh, the driver narrated to me a most incredible experience of his car sliding down a gorge and getting miraculously entangled in the branches of a tree overlooking the intimidating valley below the icy slopes of the Rohtang Pass. He told me that he suffered a concussion and some spinal injury, and was eventually airlifted by a helicopter in the morning after surviving one full chilly night inside a suspended car hanging perilously from a branch. Why is it that some people become lucky and are able to escape or survive calamitous situations? The Cambridge dictionary defines providence as “an influence that is not human in origin and is thought to control people’s lives”. Of course, some others would say that these were mere coincidences and more should not be read into them.
But what was it that saved the bus passengers or the family or the driver? While some believe that whatever happens in life happens for a reason, some others are more sceptical. The argument of coincidence, of course, cannot be stretched beyond a point. There are some who see the hand of providence even in coincidence. “A coincidence is a small miracle when God chooses to remain anonymous” is what Einstein is believed to have said.
Interestingly the power of providence is invoked and recognised when a person survives a calamity and seldom when he succumbs to it!
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