The Absurd Machine: Safety, Accountability, and the Sisyphean Pursuit of Progress

The Weight of Unfinished Business

There is something profoundly absurd about the Canadian authorities’ recent identification of a deceased suspect in the 1985 Air India Flight 182 bombing. Here we have the machinery of justice grinding forward, thirty-nine years after 329 souls were lost to the Atlantic, only to announce that they know who did it—but cannot tell us, cannot prosecute, cannot offer even the cold comfort of a name spoken aloud. The suspect is dead, privacy laws protect the dead, and the living are left to contemplate the hollowness of this revelation.

This is the condition of modern accountability: we possess the tools to uncover truth, yet find ourselves shackled by the very systems we created to protect us. The investigation continues, critics voice their familiar refrains about institutional incompetence, and somewhere in the distance, we hear the sound of Sisyphus laughing at our predicament. We have identified the boulder, but it remains forever at the bottom of the mountain.

The Theater of Technical Precision

Meanwhile, Boeing’s engineers huddle over their CFM LEAP-1B engines, addressing the rather pressing concern that bird strikes might fill passenger cabins with smoke. The NTSB issues recommendations, flight manuals are revised, software updates are promised. Here is the modern cathedral of safety—built not from stone and prayer, but from technical bulletins and regulatory compliance.

Yet what strikes me most deeply about this mechanical ballet is not its precision, but its essential futility. We engineer solutions to problems we discover only after they manifest, each fix revealing new vulnerabilities, each safety measure highlighting previous oversights. The Boeing 737 Max, that monument to ambition and compromise, continues to teach us that our mastery over the machine is itself an illusion.

The pilots study their revised manuals with the dedication of monks copying scripture, but they know—as we all know—that the next unforeseen failure is already taking shape in some component we haven’t yet learned to worry about. This is not pessimism; it is the recognition that our technological civilization rests on a foundation of beautiful, terrible uncertainty.

The Optimism of Concrete and Steel

Against this backdrop of institutional failure and mechanical fallibility, Ahmedabad emerges as a curious counterpoint. Here is a city that has decided to become India’s sports capital through sheer force of will and Rs 521 crore in annual investment. The Para High Performance Centre rises from the Gujarat earth, the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Sports Enclave takes shape, and zone-wise sports complexes multiply like symbols of faith in the future.

There is something both admirable and absurd about this civic ambition. While Air India’s wounds fester across decades and Boeing’s engineers chase mechanical ghosts, Ahmedabad plants its flag in the soil of possibility. The city declares itself a sports capital not because it has earned the title through tradition, but because it has chosen to earn it through investment and infrastructure.

This is the modern city’s answer to the absurd condition: if we cannot solve the problems of the past, we will build our way toward a different future. If we cannot guarantee safety in the skies, we will at least guarantee excellence on the playing field.

The Paradox of Progress

What emerges from these three trending narratives is a portrait of our contemporary predicament. We live in an age where accountability moves at the speed of bureaucracy, where safety advances through the accumulation of failures, and where progress manifests most clearly in cities that have decided to reinvent themselves wholesale.

The families who lost loved ones in that 1985 bombing, the passengers who breathe smoke-filled air during bird strikes, the young athletes training in Ahmedabad’s new facilities—they are all participants in the same grand experiment. We are testing whether human institutions can keep pace with human ambition, whether our systems can deliver the safety and justice they promise, whether our cities can become what we dream them to be.

The Eternal Return

In the end, perhaps the most honest response to these trends is neither cynicism nor optimism, but a kind of absurd acceptance. The Air India investigation will continue its crawl toward truth, Boeing will issue more technical bulletins, and Ahmedabad will build more sports complexes. Each represents a different strategy for confronting the impossible: the past that cannot be undone, the machine that cannot be perfected, the future that cannot be guaranteed.

We are all Sisyphus now, pushing our various boulders up their various mountains. The question is not whether we will reach the top—we know we will not—but whether we can find meaning in the pushing itself. In the grinding wheels of delayed justice, in the careful engineering of imperfect solutions, in the audacious architecture of municipal dreams, we glimpse something essentially human: the refusal to surrender to the absurd, even when—especially when—surrender would be the most rational response.

The boulder will roll back down. We will push it up again. And in that eternal return, we might discover that the pushing itself is the point.