What is the value of life?

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The other day while driving I noticed a person on the wrong side of the road and causing traffic disruption due to this. This is a sight pretty common these days and makes me wonder, why do people do that? Driving on wrong side of road or zipping past in full speed, is surely not safe and so don't they value their life?

In this specific incident, there is road construction work happening outside a society. People coming out of it could usually cross the road from the road divider right outside and go on. But due to this work, they now need to drive about half a km extra, take a U turn and then come back. So net is about 1 km extra. This person, in order to avoid this, went in the direction opposite to the traffic as the road divider there was much closer.

So is the life really worth just that 1 km that the person saved? Or given a 10km/l average, and Rs 48/l petrol cost, that's just about Rs 5 saving. Is that the value of life? Or is it roughly the 5 min (depending on the traffic) saved? Is that the value of life?

Comments

  1. The Rustic GoddessMarch 8, 2010 at 12:47 PM

    I don;t think, the person even thought about his life here. We all tend to operate with the belief that nothing can happen to us. Anything which happens , always happens to others. Till we all have this mindset, these things will keep on happening.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AtulMarch 9, 2010 at 7:09 PM

    Perfect ! can't agree more. I always say that people have this mind set that "accidents happen to others"

    ReplyDelete

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