India, July 13 -- Fifteen families are now mourning the death of their loved ones. The only honest tribute to them would be to ensure that this will not happen again

Fifteen Indian tourists - colleagues on what was meant to be a light-hearted company outing - drowned on Saturday when their speedboat capsized barely 400 metres off Vietnam's Phu Quoc Island. Of the 36 people aboard, 21 survived, pulled out by jet skis and nearby fishermen even as others remained trapped inside the overturned hull. The sea took them so close to shore that this reads less like an act of nature and more like a systems failure - the kind that, with basic precautions, does not have to end in a body count.

Survivor accounts describe a familiar sequence of small...