Air India crash: On BJMC anniversary day, sombre mood on campus coping with grief

AHMEDABAD: An air of grief hung heavy on the campus of the B J Medical College and Hospital on Monday, with wailing kin awaiting identification of their loved ones who perished in the June 12 Air India plane crash, and medics who lost their colleagues in the tragedy bravely soldiering on.
Except that today is not an ordinary day in the academic calendar of this nearly 150-year-old medical institution, which annually marks June 16 as its foundation day.
The Ahmedabad air tragedy, which claimed the lives of all but one of the 242 passengers and crew on board, and several others on the ground, has left deep scars on BJMC's residential quarters and the psyche of the survivors.
The London-bound flight AI171 -- Boeing Dreamliner 787-8 -- crashed moments after taking off from the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport here on Thursday afternoon, and fell onto the campus of the medical college in the Meghaninagar area, before going up in flames.
On that fateful day, many medical students and resident doctors had just sat for meals at the hostel mess of the BJMC, when the tail-side portion of the aircraft rammed into it, turning an ordinary lunch hour into a horrific nightmare.
Besides the 241 fatalities on board, another 29 persons, including five MBBS students, on the ground were killed in the Air India plane crash.
Soon after the crash, pieces of wreckage of the aircraft lay strewn around the hostel area, while thick layers of soot are still deposited on its buildings, damaged as a result of the crash.
Arun Prashant, a Chennai native and second-year MD student at the Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Medical College (BJMC), recalled the horror and how he jumped from the first floor of a hostel building to escape.
"I came to have lunch around 1:30 pm. While having lunch, I heard a loud explosion, and suddenly there was smoke everywhere. I ran downstairs and then jumped from the first floor of the building," Prashant told reporters in Ahmedabad a day after the crash.
"We were around 20-30 people at Atulyam (hostel). We got to know it was a plane crash only after coming out of the building," Prashant recalled.

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