How losing sleep helped Hyderabad man become lone survivor of the Saudi crash

By _shalini oraon

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The Paradox of Survival: How a Sleepless Night in Hyderabad Saved a Man from the Saudi Crash

In the annals of aviation disasters, survival often hinges on a fragile chain of seemingly random events—a missed alarm, a last-minute seat change, a forgotten passport. For Mohammad Basheer Siddiqui, a 48-year-old Indian electrician from Hyderabad, survival was forged in the crucible of a frustrating, sleep-deprived night. His story is not one of heroic action during the crash itself, but a profound testament to how fate can intertwine mundane human struggles with life-and-death consequences. He became the lone Indian survivor of the tragic Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight SV763 crash not because of what happened in the air, but because of what happened on the ground, in the tense hours before his flight was even scheduled to depart.

The date was November 12, 1996. The scene was New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, a bustling hub of hope and farewells. Siddiqui was among the 312 people—a mix of Indian expatriates, Saudi nationals, and other international passengers—who had checked in for the flight bound for Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. For Siddiqui, like for hundreds of others on board, this was a routine journey. He was an electrician working in the Kingdom, and this trip was a return to his livelihood after a visit to his family in Hyderabad. He was a cog in the vast machinery of Indian diaspora labor that powered the Gulf economies, a man whose life was defined by hard work and the relentless pursuit of a better future for his family back home.

The day had been long and taxing. The pre-flight rituals—the journey to the airport, the hectic check-in, the security checks—were enough to drain anyone. But for Siddiqui, an additional, invisible weight was pressing down: a desperate need for sleep. He had been suffering from a severe bout of insomnia in the days leading up to his departure. The excitement of seeing his family or the anxiety of returning to work, or perhaps a combination of both, had stolen his rest. As he sat in the departure lounge, the cacophony of announcements and the murmur of the crowd faded into a dull roar against the backdrop of his own exhaustion. His body was in the airport, but his mind was foggy, grappling with a fatigue that felt almost physical.

It was this very fatigue that began to alter his destiny. As the time for boarding approached, Siddiqui made a decision that, in hindsight, would cleave his life into a before and after. He decided he could not board the plane in his current state. The thought of being crammed into a narrow seat for the hours-long flight, unable to find the rest his body craved, was unbearable. He needed to sleep, immediately and profoundly. In a move that must have seemed irrational to any onlooker, he approached the airline counter.

His request was simple, yet unprecedented for most travelers: he asked to be offloaded from the flight. He explained his extreme exhaustion and his inability to travel. The ground staff, accustomed to dealing with delays and emergencies but perhaps not with a request born purely of sleeplessness, processed his cancellation. The specifics of whether he received a refund or was rebooked are lost to the finer print of history, for they were irrelevant in that moment. What mattered was that his name was scrubbed from the passenger manifest. The seat that was assigned to him was now, effectively, empty.

We can only imagine him leaving the bustling terminal, finding a quiet, modest hotel room or perhaps the home of a relative in Delhi, and finally succumbing to the sleep that had eluded him. As his head hit the pillow, Flight SV763, a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar, thundered down the runway and lifted into the night sky over Delhi.

Meanwhile, another aircraft, Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907, an Ilyushin Il-76TD cargo plane, was also in the air, approaching Delhi from the opposite direction. What happened next was a catastrophic failure of systems and communication. The two aircraft, operating in the same aerial corridor, lost the mandated separation. At around 6:40 PM, local time, over the village of Charkhi Dadri in Haryana, about 60 miles west of Delhi, the two giants of the sky collided.

The mid-air collision is recorded as one of the deadliest in aviation history. The Saudi flight, carrying 312 people, and the Kazakh flight, with 37 on board, were utterly destroyed. Wreckage and bodies rained down over a wide area. There were no survivors from either aircraft. The news sent shockwaves across the world, particularly in India and Saudi Arabia, where communities were decimated by the loss.

Back in his room, Mohammad Basheer Siddiqui woke from his deep, life-saving sleep. It’s impossible to know when the reality of his situation dawned on him. Perhaps he saw the news on television, or received a frantic call from a relative who had seen the passenger list. The moment of realization must have been a surreal cocktail of horror, disbelief, and a profound, trembling gratitude. The flight he was supposed to be on was gone. Every single person on it was gone. He was alive because he was tired.

In the days and weeks that followed, Siddiqui’s story emerged as a sliver of light in an overwhelming darkness. He was dubbed the “miracle man” in the press. His photograph—a man with a quiet, haunted expression—was in every newspaper. But the miracle was not divine; it was human. It was rooted in the simple, universal need for rest. His survival posed a philosophical question: can a personal struggle, perceived as a weakness, become the very source of one’s salvation?

For Siddiqui, the aftermath was a complex journey. The guilt of surviving, the “why me?” that plagues every sole survivor, must have been a heavy burden. He returned to a hero’s welcome in his Hyderabad neighborhood, but the cheers could not fully erase the memory of the 312 faces he had briefly shared a terminal with. His life was irrevocably changed. The crash became the central, defining event of his existence, a story he would be asked to recount for years to come.

The Charkhi Dadri disaster led to sweeping changes in Indian aviation, including the mandatory installation of Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) in all commercial aircraft. But beyond the technical reforms, the story of Mohammad Basheer Siddiqui endures as a powerful human parable. It reminds us that the line between life and death is often drawn not by grand designs, but by the smallest, most personal of circumstances. A man lost a night’s sleep and, in doing so, gained the rest of his life. In a world obsessed with efficiency and punctuality, his story is a haunting reminder that sometimes, the most rational decision—to board a flight on time—is not the right one, and that listening to the frail, human needs of our own bodies can be the wisest choice we ever make.