A year has passed since the Air India tragedy, yet the official inquiry limps along like a wounded animal, leaving six spectral questions to mock the living. Is this the standard of scrutiny we now accept from our institutions? The Victorian era, for all its flaws, would have demanded a straight answer within a season.
Today, we have bureaucracy, obfuscation and the quiet shuffling of feet. The first question: why did the flight data recorder yield such a pitiful amount of usable data? In an age of digital ubiquity, this failure smacks of either incompetence or deliberate suppression.
The second: who authorised the maintenance log that conveniently went missing for the two months preceding the crash? This is not a clerical oversight; it is a confession. Third, the cockpit voice recording: why were the final minutes a cacophony of static?
Fourth, the weather report: if a severe storm was forecast, why was the flight not diverted? Fifth, the pilot's training records: they were pristine, but the simulator tests told a different story. Sixth, the regulatory oversight: was the airline given a free pass because of political connections?
These questions are not curiosities. They are the skeleton keys to a locked room of negligence. Until they are answered, the dead will not rest, and the living should not either.
This is not a nation that demands answers; it is a nation that prefers silence. And silence, as Rome learned, is the prelude to collapse.
