19-YO Kerala Boy’s Powerful Road Safety Photos Will Compel You To Follow The Rules

How often have you seen a dupatta of a rider or a pillion rider’s threatening to entwine into the tyre of a two-wheeler?

Let alone seeing, I can’t count the number of times when I’d alerted someone to pull up their dupattas or stoles to prevent the inevitable.

But road safety rules are something India rarely gives much heed to. From something as simple as refusing to wear helmets to serious situations like drunk driving and driving on the wrong side, many lives have met untimely ends because of the devil-may-care attitude towards rules, despite them being instituted for our own safety.

No amount of public service initiatives or penalties seem to have any effect upon us all, for we continue to see rules being flouted and innocent people being killed due to someone else’s negligence.

What could effectively work in drawing the attention of a seemingly nonchalant population to follow road safety rules?

A 19-year-old boy from Kerala feels that photography is the key and if you check out his series which tries to raise awareness on the same, you would agree too!

Featuring his friend Anas and younger sister Hasna, Hafiz Sajeev’s pictures set their premise on seemingly innocent yet potentially fatal scenarios—like a stray dupatta that could get stuck in the tyres or opening the car door on the wrong side of the road!

Photography has always been a passion for Hafiz who is pursuing VFX and animation at an animation and visual effects institute in Kochi. He honed his photography skills through a mix of YouTube tutorials and experimentation.

To share his work with the world, his girlfriend inspired him to sign-up for an Instagram account, and also helped him coin a rather catchy username for his handle: Thrikkannan, meaning, the three-eyed one.

“That’s how it started. After completing my 12th, when I started going for classes at the Institute, I began observing how road safety measures were taken for a ride by most people.

A flying dupatta is a ‘small thing’, but this very ‘thing’ has the potential of taking not just one life, but also many in the resultant accident. Another common practice that I’d observed was how people who’d parked their cars on the wrong side would open their doors with little regard to the flowing traffic behind them. Not only are they endangering their own lives, their actions could also prove detrimental to the innocent riders, explains Hafiz.

His friend Anas is an aspiring actor and Hafiz couldn’t think of a better person to model in his photoshoot.

“The scenes we’ve recreated here are the results of such mishaps. They’re raw and unapologetic, hence I believe they’re not only effective in garnering attention but also drive a sense of alarm in people to follow the rules,” he adds.

You may also like: How Safe is Your City? We Take a Look at Their Road Safety Index

An incredibly talented photographer, Hafiz has also worked on sand mining in Alappad and education for kids of underprivileged background, and is currently working on a project centred on deforestation and its effects on summer.

You can follow his work on Instagram here.

Picture Credits: Thrikkannan/ Instagram.

(Edited by Saiqua Sultan)

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