He's doing this because an Indian tourist was killed by a horse - they are quite notorious for being hit by trains, jagannatha etc.

Some people say that it's because forcing horses to work in a dense, heavily polluted urban environment is cruel, but I don't see these rules being applied to Sarah Jessica Parker.

I'll get my coat

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comrade1234 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> He's doing this because an Indian tourist was killed by a horse - they are quite notorious for being hit by trains, jagannatha etc.

Is that real or just a meme? I mean the part about Indians being notorious for being hit by trains.

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disillusioned an hour ago | parent | next [-]

India averages 20,000 deaths by train every year. About 16 deaths per 100,000 people.

Compare to 40,000 vehicle deaths in the US (and 960 train deaths, 2.8 deaths per 100,000 people), and 177,000 vehicle deaths in India.

But India only has 1 death per _4.1 billion passenger-miles_. The US is 1 death per 2.33 billion passenger-miles.

Anecdotally, there's a _lot_ of Indians-walking-near-trains-and-getting-hit-posting-them-doing-it videos on reddit.

In any event, the OP is way off target anyway. The poor kid was in a carriage with his mom, the horse got spooked, she fell out and he leapt out to try to save her but hit his head and died.

	▲	rob74 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I guess "deaths per billion passenger-miles" is not a good metric if you want to compare the US and India, because travelling by rail is simply not that popular in the US (I assume the statistic does not include metro systems?). But if you get run over by a train, it doesn't really matter if it was a freight train or a passenger train (<5% of train casualties are actual train passengers).

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ErroneousBosh an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> I mean the part about Indians being notorious for being hit by trains.

I'm genuinely surprised we don't see more Indian tourists getting hit by cars, at least here in Scotland. There's a bit of a trend on social media over there, where you'll get an Indian couple on holiday in Scotland taking photos of themselves sitting in the middle of a road.

Roads here are often narrow, twisty, fast, uneven, and extremely busy, so it's quite possible if you do this that the last photo ever taken of you will be the frame juuuust before the dashcam triggers.

If you look at the bush on the right of the road here just as the road curves (we drive on the left; this is looking from the back of the Streetview car heading south), when I was up a few weeks ago there was an Indian couple in wedding clothing sitting cross-legged in the middle of the road right at that bend taking a photo. I should actually pull the dashcam footage of that!

Anyway, that's a 60mph road. Do not sit in the middle of busy 60mph roads, no matter how cool the photo is. That was nearly a very short marriage, "until death do us part out into a thin smear with small chunks in for several hundred metres"...

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nizbit 9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

SJP :)