The Monday Morning Commute
The story begins 34 years ago, on the morning of November 13, 1989. It was a cool, crisp morning in the coal belt of West Bengal, India. The clock had just struck 8:00 AM.
Inside a car making its way through the morning bustle sat a man who appeared to be just another official heading to work. But this was no ordinary man; this was Jaswant Singh Gill. At the time, few knew his name outside of his professional circle, but decades later, his heroism would be immortalized on the silver screen by Akshay Kumar in the movie Mission Raniganj. On this particular morning, however, Gill was simply a General Manager for a coal mining company, focused on the day ahead.
His route from home to office was a familiar one. The path required him to cross a small bridge—a choke point known for its daily congestion. As he approached the bridge, he encountered exactly what he had expected: a thick snarl of traffic. Cars, cycles, and pedestrians were jostling for space, creating the usual morning chaos.
But as Gill sat in the gridlock, something unusual pierced the din of honking horns. It was the frantic, high-pitched wail of an emergency siren.
Peering through the windshield, Gill spotted the source: a rescue van was trapped in the middle of the traffic jam on the bridge. The vehicle was blaring its siren aggressively, trying to part the sea of commuters. For an ordinary commuter, this might have been just another annoyance, but for Gill, it was an alarm bell. As a General Manager in the coal industry, he knew exactly what a rescue van of that urgency signified. It meant a "kand"—a serious incident—had occurred in one of the mines.
Instinct took over. Gill didn't wait for the traffic to clear. He stepped out of his vehicle and wove through the stationary cars to reach the rescue van. He tapped on the window and asked the driver what had happened. The answer he received would change the course of his life and the lives of 65 families forever.