Carnival and Catastrophe

Within fifteen hours

Have you ever walked up the stairs of a stadium wearing the home team’s jersey? The noise hits you first. Drums, songs, forty thousand voices screaming together. Your spine straightens involuntarily. The smell follows: fried food and sweat and something indefinable, the scent of collective anticipation. Each step up brings you closer to beauty. By the time you reach the concourse, you’re no longer walking but floating, carried by invisible currents toward the light at the tunnel’s end. Then you emerge, and the pitch spreads under you like a vast green carpet, manicured to perfection, waiting for scripture to be written upon it. You are small, one among thousands, yet somehow enlarged by the very act of being here. The players haven’t even appeared, but you’re already home.

Your seat is plastic, numbered, covered in dried dirt, and yet it becomes your throne for these precious hours. Around you, strangers share samosas and invective, their accents varied but purpose singular. When the team emerges from the dressing room, the roar lifts your body, a physical force that obliterates individual thought. You are screaming until your throat burns raw. In these moments, you are participating in something primal, maybe even religious.

Everyone around you is a thread in this vast, breathing tapestry. Victory makes you levitate, but the losses cut into your bones. The players shower, board their bus, prepare for Tuesday’s match. You carry defeat home like a stone in your chest, nurse it through meetings and meals, through conversations that drift inevitably back to that missed run-out, that contentious decision. The wound festers for days. Yet come Saturday, you return, reassembling hope and belief from scattered pieces, ready once more to offer your heart to this beautiful, brutal ritual.

“‘Fan’ is a derivative of the word fanatic, which itself is a derivative of the Latin word fanaticus, which means a worshipper at a temple.” - Tim Parks, A Season in Verona

Now, think of the Royal Challengers Bengaluru fan who has followed this routine for seventeen seasons. Every summer starts the same way: Royal Challengers Bengaluru in their slick running gear, poised at the starting line. Sometimes the sprint begins with pace. Other times they gather momentum midway through the tournament. But - and there is a big, bold but here - for all their pace, a stumble is inevitable. Even when RCB soar through the laps, even when their contrails threaten to obscure the competition entirely, the stumble finds them.

It had become something like natural law in this competition. Eight teams, now ten, and everyone except RCB gets their chance at glory.

They’ve reached the final hurdle thrice. This one time, they timed their leap to perfection, saw the finishing tape from close, felt their leading leg land perfectly, only for their trailing leg to hit wood on its way down, leaving them spreadeagled on the mat.

Fourteen franchises have played in the IPL in all its history; only six have known the glow of the trophy. Yet RCB have always felt like an easy punchline, the Goliath unable to even touch other Davids. Rightly so, many will argue.

Their story is different from all the other teams with barren cupboards. Unlike the others, RCB emanate a sense of should. They have always been a heavyweight team with heavyweight players, even if arranged without plan or purpose. The heaviest of them all has worn their colours through these seventeen years, from the day they first walked out in red-and-gold jerseys with tiger stripes to the slick Puma red-and-black.

Virat Kohli was a chubby-cheeked teenager when RCB were given the second pick from India’s triumphant under-19 team. Charu Sharma, their then-CEO, tells the story of taking mere milliseconds to yell his name out. Under their shadow, Kohli first became an India player, then a dynamite, and then a superstar. Virat Kohli was RCB’s captain when he ascended to cricket’s Everest and set up camp.

The IPL crown had to be won, of course, but there was universal acknowledgment that its sparkle would be infused with new light on a certain forehead.

For a few years, Virat fell short with AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle. The three best batters of a batter-friendly format, and yet, not quite enough for the title. It was a lot like Lionel Messi’s Argentina falling short at World Cups and Copa Americas. With weak teams; with strong teams; with Aguero, Tevez, and di Maria; with Diego Maradona as coach - nothing quite made it happen. But their heartbreak came every four years, sometimes two. Virat and RCB’s came annually.

Can you imagine suffering a heartbreak every twelve months? Those RCB fans could be forgiven for wondering if their time would ever come.

It sounds a lot like hindsight’s polish now, but right from the start of this year’s tournament, parts were aligning and patterns were emerging. For perhaps the first time in a decade, RCB didn’t feel like Virat and co. but something more democratic - a team where match-winners could emerge from any quarter. As it turned out, they did. Of their sixteen matches this year, RCB had eight different Player of The Match recipients. Virat could go back to his natural role as fulcrum while the younger and more explosive orbited around him. He still conjured up more than 600 runs at an exceptional rate, but, in the best possible way, without monopolising the narrative.

The catharsis arrived late in the night of June 3rd. As Josh Hazlewood went through the motions in the final over, the emotions started swelling. The fireworks went first, then came the waterworks. Virat’s moist eyes were almost as red as his shirt. By my conservative estimate, the RCB anthem must’ve played at around a hundred separate pubs simultaneously.

Then Bengaluru, drunk on its own catharsis, came out to party. You’ve seen the pictures and videos. They weren’t going to sleep that night. Horns, fireworks, and music tore through the air. I wonder if some even dreamt with the background score of “Huwawayo! RCB!”

There would be more the next morning. There had to be.

There was.

You know how this story ends. In the days since, I have spoken to some fans who attended the victory parade, some others who have attended large-scale public events elsewhere, and multiple ex-police commissioners. Just to piece together the events from 4th June, and to understand how something so avoidable could be allowed to happen. The kind folks at Newslaundry published my essay here.

I am quoting some bits from the essay that give you a hint of the situation.

Bhaskar Rao has served in the police force for 33 years, including a long spell as the police commissioner of Bengaluru. I’m on a call with him, and his anguish is showing.

“Why the rush? You have to give time to the forces, plan properly. There was a huge frenzy the previous night. It was clear that the city had reacted with emotion. The celebrations were going on till early morning.”

Tarutr Malhotra has been a Bangalore boy all his life. For 17 seasons, he had ridden the wave of euphoria with RCB, only to crashland into despair every time. Early in the afternoon hours of June 4, still hungover from adrenaline, he made his way to the Cubbon Park metro station, from where all roads led to Chinnaswamy Stadium.

“As soon as you got down from the metro station, you got a sense of a large crowd congregating for the day’s events,” he tells me in a phone conversation. “But there wasn’t any organisation, any idea of what was going on. A swelling crowd was just going off on hearsay and rumours. That said, the lack of police barricades, medical tents, or water stations was very noticeable.”

He spoke to a couple of police officers en route. One told him, “not happening”; another said, “it’s on.”

By one count, nearly 300,000 turned up for the Victory Parade, packing into the mile’s distance between the Vidhana Soudha and the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium. To amplify the tension, neither those at the parade nor the hopefuls coming in had any clue of what’s happening, whether the ceremonies were on or not, whether the event at the stadium was free or ticketed.

Source: Mid-Day

At 4 pm, the dam broke. Chinnaswamy’s Gate 3 opened partially, and a large mass, comprising both ticket holders and hopefuls, attempted to swarm into the premises. Eyewitness accounts speak of people pushing, pulling, falling to the ground, falling over each other, getting trampled without anyone around to bring them to order. Before long, the same scene was unfolding at Gate 7 and Gate 14.

Inayath, a resident of Lingarajapuram and an eyewitness to the incident, told Indian Express: “Everyone just flooded in. In the chaos, some people fell on the ground. There was nobody to control the crowd or offer help.”

The tragedy at Chinnaswamy was India’s fourth stampede of this year, and seventh in the last 1000 days. What does that say about our crowd management practices?

May 2025 – Goa Lairai Devi temple

Six devotees died during Shirgao’s annual fire-walking festival when a scuffle on a narrow, unlit road sparked panic among 1,50,000 attendees. Poor pathway design and lack of emergency exits hindered escape, prompting Goa’s CM to order infrastructure audits for religious sites.

February 2025 – New Delhi railway station

Delays in trains to the Maha Kumbh Mela created overcrowding on footbridges at Platform 14, triggering a stampede that killed 18. Misleading announcements about a special train worsened the surge, with 1,500 general tickets sold hourly despite inadequate infrastructure.

January 2025 – Prayagraj Maha Kumbh Mela

A midnight rush during Mauni Amavasya bathing rituals led to 30 deaths at Sangam Ghat after barricades collapsed near VIP zones. Hundreds were injured. Hospital and police records suggest the deaths could be as high as 79.

July 2024 – Hathras satsang

A self-styled guru’s overcrowded prayer meeting killed 121, mostly women and children, after a dust storm caused suffocation in a single-exit venue. Despite permissions for 80,000, 250,000 attended, exposing flawed risk assessments and organiser accountability gaps.

March 2023 – Indore stepwell collapse

Thirty-six worshippers died when an illegally constructed stepwell cover collapsed during Rama Navami at Beleshwar Mahadev temple. Authorities had previously warned about structural violations, highlighting systemic corruption in permitting unsafe religious modifications.

January 2022 – Mata Vaishno Devi

A New Year’s Eve stampede killed 12 pilgrims in Jammu amid Covid-19 protocol breaches, as 50,000 crowded pathways meant for 35,000. A police lathi charge escalated chaos, underscoring poor crowd-calibration strategies at major shrines.

The rest of the story, and a lot of insights from Bhaskar Rao, Tarutr, and other fans I spoke to, are in the full essay here.

One day, I will write about RCB’s season. They deserve their story to be told too. This was no smash-and-grab. It was an exceptionally-executed tournament from everyone between their playing members to their backroom staff.

For now, though, the questions are different and much graver.