Sole survivor. (This is so weird and eerie.)

A few weeks ago, there was a horrific plane crash in India when a London-bound Air India flight went down in Ahmedabad shortly after taking off. There were 242 people (passengers and crew) on board the plane; 241 of them were killed. One man survived. (The plane went down in a highly-populated residential section of Ahmedabad, plowing into a residence for medical students. As of this writing, the number killed on the ground is not known, but the total number of fatalities is estimated to be as high as 300 or so.)

But that one man in the plane weirdly, eerily, miraculously survived.

The sole survivor was 40-year-old Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a British man of Indian origin who had been visiting family in India. One of this brothers was also on the plane; he did not survive.

Ramesh, from London, described seeing bodies all around him after the crash.

“Thirty seconds after takeoff, there was a loud noise and then the plane carashed. It all happened so quickly," Ramesh, who still had his boarding pass, told the Hindustand Times. He said that he had "impact injuries, including bruising on his chest, eyes and feet but was otherwise lucid and conscious. 

“When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me. Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital.”

Footage filmed shortly after the crash showed Ramesh bloodied and limping as he walked to an ambulance. Police said he had been sitting in an emergency exit row and had managed to jump out. (Source: The Guardian)

What must be going through this guy's head? How do you sort through your own survival, when everyone else on the flight - and then some - were killed? When one of those killed was his brother? When his injuries, while not trivial, aren't dire? (Physically, anyway.)

Good for his sake that he survived, of course. He's forty, with a wife and a young child back in England. He's got a lot of life ahead of him. But yikes!

Ramesh crazily survives, but in making his escape, he's walking through a smoldering hellscape full of dead bodies. Including that of his brother, which he did not, of course, know at the time. Having survived himself he would certainly have reasonably thought there was a possibility that there were others who did as well. 

I'm sure that Vishwash Ramesh will be able to tell/sell his story. I'm sure that there'll be a fundraiser to help support his recovery. I'm sure that there'll be some compensation from Tata, the mega-conglomerate which owns Air India. And, depending on whether there was a structural/mechanical problem with the plane, from Boeing, the beleagurered maker of the ill-fated 787. A Dreamliner. (NOT!)

Still, all the money in the world isn't going to help this fellow shake this experience out of his head. 

How do you ever get over the "why me" question?

Guess the only answer is "why not me?"

Mass-scale fatality accidents like this are beyond terrible for the friends and families of those killed. But it's pretty damned terrible to be the sole survivor. 

Good luck, Vishwash Ramesh. Having had one bit of weird and eerie good fortune, going forward you're going to need all the good luck that's out there for the having. 

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Image Source: Yahoo.