What the Lucknow fire says about the everyday gamble of being alive in India

What lies in an afternoon? A few desperate phone calls, corridors swallowed by thick black smoke, shattered windowpanes, and lives trapped inside rooms that had seemed utterly ordinary only minutes earlier. Imagining death by burning is not easy. Many find a grim comfort in believing that smoke suffocated the victims before the fire reached them.

In a country where absurdity often hides in plain sight, sudden death does not always arrive with the spectacle of a flood, an earthquake or a terrorist attack. Sometimes it begins with a suspected short circuit in an air-conditioning unit. Sometimes it travels silently through faulty wiring, combustible material and neglected safeguards before announcing itself as smoke. It creeps up staircases, enters classrooms and offices, and is never far from private homes. All this can induce anxiety. Sometimes it simply extinguishes lives, ends possibilities in a blink, and turns an ordinary day into an inferno in broad daylight.

As on Monday afternoon, when a fire blazed through a commercial building in Lucknow’s Aliganj locality. The building housed, among other establishments, a gaming and animation studio where trainees and staff members were at work. Most of the dead were in their twenties. Survivors spoke of corridors disappearing into blackness, of smoke entering bathrooms where people had locked themselves in the hope of survival, of windows being smashed and cables being used in desperate attempts to escape. One person managed to break a window and flee, returning to a world that carried on at its usual pace – snarling, honking and pushing forward.

Only weeks ago, a hotel fire in Delhi claimed more than 20 lives. Not long before that came the fire in a neonatal intensive care unit in Jhansi, where newborn children died in a healthcare facility. In the last few months alone, there have been hospital fires in different states, factory fires that trapped workers, commercial-building fires and fire-triggered stampedes.

For years, stories of fires claiming lives have followed a familiar cycle – horror, more horror, outrage, suspensions and inquiries. Then comes the inevitable call for accountability. If accountability is measured by the next set of statistics, however, it remains elusive. More lives are consumed by preventable fires long before responsibility is fixed. The swelling national archive of preventable grief, like any archive, fades into memory. It hardly registers amid the relentless flux of daily life.

The Lucknow fire is set to follow the same cycle – horror, outrage, blame and counter-blame. The questions are already familiar: fire-safety compliance, evacuation systems, access control, emergency exits, building design and administrative oversight. It is all of that. Yet it is not experienced equally by everyone.

The need for a villain

The average Indian takes many such risks in stride because there is little alternative. Barring a few exceptions, the victims of these tragedies are rarely the rich or the privileged. The affluent buy as much distance as they can from the public spaces inhabited by the average Indian and the many death traps that ordinary people must navigate. It is the average Indian whose life intersects daily with crumbling public infrastructure and unsafe commercial spaces, where death is always ready to make a sudden appearance.

In that Lucknow building, the victims were going about their lives, doing mundane things. They were not taking exceptional risks. Most of them were inside a workplace, training, working or simply passing time. They were doing what millions of Indians do every day: showing up, hoping to learn, work, earn, perhaps get a little entertained, and return home.

There is an understandable tendency after such disasters to search for a single villain. Sometimes there is an obvious one: a glaring act of negligence, corruption blending with incompetence to produce disastrous consequences. But reducing every tragedy to a search for one definitive culprit can obscure something larger. The repetition itself is the story.

When similar patterns emerge across cities, states and decades, the issue is no longer merely one of individual failure. It becomes a reflection of how safety is valued, monitored and enforced in the public sphere. Perhaps what is most unsettling is the gradual normalisation of risk. Indians learn, often unconsciously, to navigate dangers that should not exist. One learns to avoid exposed wiring, overcrowded exits, unstable structures, reckless traffic, poorly maintained public facilities and countless other hazards. Vigilance becomes a survival skill; the burden of safety quietly shifts from institutions to individuals.

Look around any Indian city and you can see this adaptation at work. People instinctively assess buildings, roads, crowds and transport systems. They plan around dysfunction. They anticipate failure and prepare for contingencies. In many ways, the exceptional is woven into the routine. In the prose of the city-nostalgic affluent writer, such adaptation is often romanticised as resilience.

The insulation

Such romanticism emerges from insulation: far removed from the risks that shape everyday life. The affluent can choose safer neighbourhoods, better-maintained buildings, private transport, controlled environments and multiple layers of protection from the failures of public infrastructure. For millions of ordinary Indians, that luxury does not exist. Their lives are intertwined with crowded roads, ageing buildings, overburdened systems and public spaces whose safety they must often take on trust.

The images from the Lucknow fire will fade from public memory sooner than we think. They may not even have registered with many. The smoke-filled corridors, the locked bathrooms, the desperate search for an exit, and the voices that pleaded for help over the phone will slowly recede into the background noise of a country that has seen too many such tragedies. Another fire somewhere else, another building collapse, another stampede, another accident waiting around the corner will take their place.

To die trapped inside a burning building is not only a horrific end to life but also a denial of dignity in death. The final phone calls, the unanswered pleas for help and the lives extinguished in minutes become part of a public horror that eventually recedes into the background until its successor fills the front pages once again.

For the average Indian, being alive often feels like a daily lottery won against absurd odds. A day when the fire does not start. A day when the exits are never needed. A day when the crowd does not surge and trample people. A day when the building stands, the wiring holds and chance looks elsewhere.

It is that random. It is that contingent.

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