23 hours ago
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N. Raghuraman, Management Guru
Luck can be defined differently in different professions. For example, for a professional cricketer, hitting the ball exactly where the bat lands would not be considered luck, but the ball landing exactly where the batsman hits it would be considered luck.
At the same time, the definition of luck for common people can be completely different. And 31-year-old Sanjay Yadav from Jharkhand understood this in a tenth of a second! Today he is a sensation on social media.
You might be wondering how someone can learn this in less than a second? Here is the answer. Sanjay is a cab driver in Mumbai and lives in a 15×10 sq ft chawl with four other friends in a remote suburb.
Sanjay always wanted to earn as much money as possible and keep his wife and two children with him in Mumbai. For the last six years, he has been barely able to meet the basic needs of two families – one in Jharkhand and the other in Mumbai and his own expenses.
On the afternoon of August 16, Sanjay had completed 3-4 rides and was about to sit down to have a cup of tea when his roommate, who is also a cab driver, asked him to pick up a female passenger as he also had a ride at the same pickup time. Sanjay took the ride.
The 57-year-old woman wanted to go to the newly built Atal Setu in Mumbai to immerse some pictures of the deity. When Sanjay said that stopping the vehicle was not allowed on Atal Setu, the woman insisted that it would not take more than five minutes.
Sanjay took her to Atal Setu and during that time they had a light conversation and everything seemed normal. They reached the bridge at 7 pm but she did not know that she was going to get an electric shock. The woman parked the car at an angle so that no one could see what she was doing.
Sanjay stopped near the toll plaza exit and asked the woman to hurry up. He thought the woman’s bag contained pictures and idols of gods which she would throw down from the bridge, but he became alert when the woman climbed over the crash barrier and started throwing the pictures one after the other down.
Sanjay got nervous as he could get caught for breaking the rules, so he got out of the car to ask what she was doing. To distract Sanjay, the woman asked for water to sprinkle on the photographs.
Since the water bottle kept on the passenger side was empty. As he was coming towards the driver’s side, he saw a traffic police patrol car coming towards him with siren blaring. In the last second between 7.05 and 7.06, the woman climbed over the barrier, dangled her legs down towards the sea and almost jumped.
And Sanjay caught hold of the woman by her hair in less than a second. During this time his hand was getting cut by the sharp barrier but he held the woman by her hair for the next 16 seconds, until the traffic police came and climbed the railing and caught the woman by her left wrist and then Sanjay’s injured hand got some relief and the woman could be rescued safely.
At the police station, the family members thanked Sanjay for hours, holding his hand and calling him an angel, while the police, after thanking him, warned him not to stop on the bridge next time. But in the next few hours, no one could stop Sanjay from becoming a social media sensation. In the last one week, many passengers recognized him and also generously helped him financially.
The funda is that Luck is the meeting point of two things – alertness of mind and arrival of opportunities.
