1981 KILLER RAILS

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It was a year when death stalked India’s rail network, the second-largest in the world. Between January and September alone, there were 526 train derailments. Railway Minister kedar Nath Pande was already neck-deep in trouble over the rising number of accidents, when on June 6, seven of the nine bogies of the overcrowded 416 Down derailed over a bridge while crossing river Bagmati at Balaghat in Bihar. The reason for the accident remained shrouded in mystery, as did the death toll immediately after the accident. The final figure was pegged to be at least 400.

ALMOST THERE

Vijay Amritraj stumbled at the quarter-final stage for the second time at the Wimbledon Championships when he went down to American Jimmy Connors in five sets.

J.R.D. Tata chose Ratan Tata, an outside contender, as his successor to the Tata empire over much stronger probables like Rusi Mody, Freddie Mehta and Nani Palkhivala.

FIRST CUT

The International Monetary Fund announced a mammoth Rs 5,000-crore loan to India in December, the highest in the fund’s history.

“I AM GOING TO STAY.”

A.R. Antulay

Maharashtra Chief Minister A.R. Antulay may have said of Arun Shourie in the wake of the Trustgate revelations, “He is not the conscience keeper of the nation”. But Shourie’s meticulous research into Antulay’s fraudulent Rs 50-crore Indira Gandhi Pratibha Pratisthan rust Fund scandal—wherein Antulay asked builders to donate to the trust in exchange for favours—meant he couldn’t dodge the fire of the 14 column-inch bombshell Shourie dropped on his readers on August 31. Another feather in the firebrand investigative reporter’s cap.

From Pune to Oregon

On May 1, having discoursed daily for nearly 15 years, Bhagwan Rajneesh aka Osho entered a three-and-a-half-year period of public silence. On June 1, he left for the US, moving to a farm in Oregon with his followers.

MAGIC CARPET RIDE

Salman Rushdie took the world—and the Booker Prize jury—on a magic-carpet ride across the Indian sub-continent with his Midnight’s Children. With his brand of masala magic realism, the Bombay-born, Cambridge-educated writer redrew the map of Indian literature in English and provided a generation of immigrant authors a template to translate their essentially Indian experiences into something universally palatable. The no-show Grimus far behind now, this was a new, quirkier Sir Salman on display.

ELSEWHERE…

• IBM introduces the personal computer, IBM PC, heralding the start of the computing age.
• John Lennon’s (Just Like) Starting Over and the album Double Fantasy topped music charts just weeks after his death.
• Ronald Reagan below was sworn in as President of the US, ushering in an era of “Reagonomics” to bring down inflation, and unemployment.
• Peter Sutcliffe, a truck driver later convicted as the “Yorkshire Ripper” for murdering 13 women, was arrested in England.

1,186 was the number of armed dacoits the Uttar Pradesh Government claimed to have killed over the course of the year. A result of a deliberate, stepped-up action against the growing dacoit menace, this was the highest kill-count in the state’s history.

Courtesy By India Today