Opinion Bengaluru stampede: No villains, no terror, but the unbearable weight of unmanaged emotion

RCB, that most mercurial of IPL franchises, had shed its identity as cricket’s most glamorous therapy group and actually gone and done the unthinkable — lifted the trophy. And the fans, faithful to a fault, responded like survivors of a long winter stumbling into spring. They swarmed the streets not to riot, but to rejoice. And somewhere in that bliss, the air ran out.

A celebration became a stampede. A triumph became a requiem.

But this isn’t a Bengaluru tragedy. Nor a cricketing one. It is the ancient, foot-worn ghost that returns wherever humans try to gather joyfully without first informing the fire marshal. It visited the Kumbh Mela in January, when 30 people died, crushed in a space that was not meant to accommodate the weight of a nation’s sin and salvation. It showed up during the 2021 Kumbh too, when lakhs of people decided that divine immunity trumped pandemic science.

We know this ghost well. It appeared in Hillsborough, in Itaewon, in Mecca. And each time, we are shocked, as though chaos isn’t the inevitable consequence of designing joy without a blueprint.

The psychology of the crush

What happens in a stampede is not madness. It’s math — and psychology.

In crowds, our individuality does not disappear. It gets outsourced.
The part of your brain that says “this is unsafe” goes on sabbatical. In its place, the evolutionary instinct for mimicry takes over. One person runs. Two follow. Twenty panic. The rest become physics. We are not thinking. We are echoing.

Gustave Le Bon wrote about the “irrationality of crowds” as if we lose IQ points in bulk. But that’s not quite right. It’s not that we become less intelligent; it’s that we surrender agency.

And there is no tragedy more silent than that of a human who no longer has control over their own feet.

We call this “emotional contagion.” It’s the same thing that makes people cheer louder when they’re surrounded by others cheering. Or cry harder at funerals they barely meant to attend. But when the contagion is panic — or ecstasy that exceeds its container — it metastasizes.

A crowd is not dangerous because it’s emotional. It’s dangerous because it’s unified.

And unity, without boundaries, becomes pressure. Literal, fatal pressure.

The banality of mourning

What happens next is equally predictable. The bureaucratic afterlife of the dead kicks in. “Unfortunate incident.” “The crowd swelled unexpectedly.” “Ex-gratia compensation of ₹5 lakh per family.” Mourning, efficiently filed under “Miscellaneous”.

There are no villains. Only velocity. No ideology, no terror, just the unbearable weight of unmanaged joy.

But if you had paused, just for a moment, in that Bengaluru crowd, you would have seen the opposite of chaos. You would have seen care. A child on a father’s shoulders. A street vendor who closed shop early because he thought tonight would be special. A girl who just wanted to be near Kohli-shaped hope.

They didn’t die because they were careless. They died because we treat emotion like an afterthought, something to be tolerated until the data is in.

Our cities don’t plan for joy

India is built on the crowd. We don’t just gather — we perform our existence in multitudes. We mourn in hundreds. We bathe by the millions. We queue in hope. We rally in rage. But we still design our cities like we expect everyone to stay politely indoors until further notice.

Our architecture is rational. Our emotions are not. The result is tragedy in high definition.

We prepare for protest. We do not prepare for delight. Joy, in our infrastructure, is treated like a software bug — unexpected, avoidable, probably user error.

We build flyovers, not flow. We install CCTV, not empathy. Our crisis management begins only after the crowd becomes a headline. And even then, the solutions are spectacularly literal: Deploy more barricades. Install better speakers. Raise compensation.

But the question remains: How do we plan for collective ecstasy in a country where ecstasy is always assumed to be private?

A few undeniable truths, then. A crowd is not a danger. But pretending it isn’t one is. Joy is the most underestimated variable in public policy. We don’t design for feelings. We clean up after them. In a stampede, no one chooses to run. They just forget how to stop. The infrastructure of emotion is the first thing we forget and the last thing we mourn.

The crowd will return. It always does. The Kumbh will swell again. RCB will rise or collapse (or both in the same over), and people will pour into the streets again. Because we are a species that needs to be near others when we feel the most. The impulse is ancient. Sacred, even.

But perhaps the saddest part is this: The next time a child asks to go see the crowd, someone will pause. Not because they’re afraid of the dark. But because they’ve learned that joy, in our cities, can be just as lethal as fury.

So let’s not kill the instinct to gather. Let’s respect it enough to plan for it. To give it lanes, exits, care. Let us not wrap feelings in red tape, but at least anticipate its footprint.

Because the 11 people in Bengaluru didn’t go out looking for headlines. They went looking for magic. They found music and lights and shared wonder. And then, they found silence.

And for that, they should’ve been able to come home.

The writer is an advisory professional and an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur