BILASPUR: It took a seemingly perfectly innocuous ‘OK’ to upend the life of a railway station master.The man, going through a troubled marriage, uttered the two-letter word to defer a telephonic spat with his wife as he was on duty, but the message also inadvertently reached his colleague, causing major miscommunication and the railways a significant financial loss.The stationmaster’s counterpart on another line misinterpreted his OK, a sign for yes, as a confirmation for sending a train through a Maoist-affected zone during restricted hours, prompting the railways to suspend the former.This was one of the reasons the 40-year-old stationmaster cited in court to seek divorce from his wife.A division bench of Justice Rajani Dubey and Justice Sanjay Kumar Jaiswal of Chhattisgarh High Court recently granted divorce to the stationmaster, a resident of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh.As per the order, the stationmaster married a woman from Durg district in Chhattisgarh, on October 12, 2011.Within a few days, the woman confessed to him that she was in an intimate relationship with another man of Durg.The shaken stationmaster took up the matter with his father-in-law, who promised him that no problem of any kind would arise in the future and he would take responsibility for his daughter’s conduct.Even on their wedding night, the woman kept talking with her lover over the phone and made fun of the husband, the man told the court.The stationmaster told the HC that his wife would talk with her lover at night while he slept right beside her.On the night of March 22, 2012, when the man was on duty, the couple got into a fight over the phone.Since he was at work, the stationmaster said he would come home and talk to her and disconnected the call saying ‘OK.’His counterpart at Kamaloor railway station in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district also heard the OK and mistook it as a green signal to dispatch a train during the restricted period in the Maoist-affected zone (train movements are prohibited between 10 pm and 6 am in Naxal-hit pockets).
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