Jai Hind Saab

“JAI HIND SAAB…!!!” -MukeshRawat [email protected]

Sharp olive green barrettes with sparkling cap badges, polished DMS boots, white shining anklets, a loaded SLR(Self Loading Rifle) mounded to its single round fire mode and the command- “Parade… salami…shastra…”A stint of drill followed with a single round fire in the open air and then the SLR positioned up way down and the proud head of a soldier bowing in silence to pay his tributes to the martyr’s who sacrificed their lives for the GREAT inhabitants of this GREAT country of ours.

These are perhaps the only occasions, when a good many of us do feel a lump in our throats for our soldiers. A strange series of patriotic hysteria do engulf us therein to the zenith. March 7hours (sometime even less) on the dial and the “men in olive green” becomes a liability. In more refined terminology, ‘a just for granted thing’, to the beloved countrymen of theirs.

I would have never understood what a bye-bye really means, had I not been to Manipur a decade ago. I was in an army convoy. It started from Dimapur( the Gateway of Nagaland) and was to end at Kamjoong, the bordering village on the Indo- Myanmar border in Manipur, where our battalion headquarters were stationed. Throughout the 18 hrs journey, spanning over two days, I saw countless village children waving their hands at our convoy whenever we crossed them. I didn’t understood why and for what it was, so I was giggling all the time I saw them waving. I was 9 then. But the 'fauji' (soldier) next to me (my dad) waved back each time, always with a broad smile. I asked him why he did so and didn’t he felt tiered of this? All he said was- “you will understand it yourself one day”.

Today when I am nailed to this routine and monochromatic life in the National Capital, where expecting a smile from a stranger is next only to violating the Ten Commandments, I do understand it all if not in totality at least substantially.

What a tiny waving hand can do to your mind and your being, in a journey which transports you to the battlefield, cannot be encrypted. It can only be felt and seen. It is not the terrifying hysteria that Mulk Raj Anand in his “Across the Black Waters” depicts in a scene wherein the troops are going to the front in a railway carriage. Their train stops only to give pass to an approaching train from the other end, bringing rotten bodies back from the front. Midst tough, challenging and alien terrain, no connectivity with your blood mates for months together, threat of being attacked the very next second thus losing your physical frame, leaving behind a family who will be uncared and often unwanted by your beloved countrymen; the smile and the tiny waving hands means a lot to a 'fauji'. It is different. It is unique. He receives and responds to it with the same child like enthusiasm. It is his Olympic gold. Everything falls short in front of that smile from the waving children. The thaumaturgetic effect that follows makes him strong enough to face all odds.

No matter whatsoever length we write on it, with howsoever crafty and creamy vocabulary, the truth is that- the “men in uniform” for us are nothing more than “machine at work”. Our expedient love and attachment for them often remains confined to the parades and ceremonies alone with its warmth being as hot as an iceberg. The human element of a fauji’s life is rarely talked, sparingly discussed and never recognized. The ones in olive greens are always perceived to be a people with blue blood in their veins and an iron plated pumping station…heart…if you call it. A fauji is perceived to be on duty and nothing else. He is thought to be a machine whose only target is-to destroy the target.

To the “aam admi”, a fauji is a “darruwalla”. He drinks, he dines and he kills. He knows nothing besides this. He can fight but he cannot think is the general notion. We have human rights for the oddest members of our race, be it butchers like Kasab or looters who sell the country. But for a fauji, a fauji is exempted from this because he is just a stone hearted killing machine which will either destroy or get destroyed and nothing else. That’s his duty. Isn’t it?

Little do we realize that under that 5 kg bullet proof also lies a thing called heart. A heart, which beats like that of yours and mine! Sitting in the comforts of our respective gradients we can never understand the agony, the commotion and the perpetual anxiety that spurs under that steaming helmet. You and I can just speculate on it. But very often that speculation is no way near the reality. When he is on an operation, in addition to overpowering the enemy, a fauji is constantly thinking about his family back home. For he knows that, there will be no one to look after it, in case he doesn’t return. This and things isotonic, are eating him up almost always, be it in his barrack or in his bunker. It is unfortunate that a decent number of them do end up ending their lives not on the battlefield but on the fan. The mental agony never gets researched and operated.

Shocked, exasperated and shameful was all I, over the recent tragedy where an IPS officer, trying to stop a tractor loaded with illegally mined stones, was crushed to death by the driver sahib in broad daylight in a state which claims to be “Hindustan ka dil” in the Incredible India series. Furthermore, his pregnant IAS wife pleads a CBI inquiry into the matter but, all that an honorable state minister has to say in response is -“This is not a big issue. Such incidents can’t shake the government. This is a ploy to dilute the government.”

My dad once said to me- “fauji ki jindagi badi anokhi hai. Jab tak jinda ho- naam hai, shauhrat hai, izzaat hai…sab kuch hai…Jis din goli lagi…gali ka kutta bhi nahin aayega poochne hamare ghar par…deewar par tange poster se jyada hesiyat nahi rah jayegi hamari yahan… 2-3 din ki formalities honge…wo bhi …agar kismet wale rahe to…!!...beta jitni masti aur mehnat karni hai ….abhi kar lo…aage ye kab tak chalega… na tum kuch jyada jante ho na main…”.

(A soldier's life is very strange. Till the time you are alive...you have name, fame, dignity... everything... but the day you are shot...not even a stray dog will come at our door...a soldier is no better than a poster on the wall thereafter...There will be some formalities for 2-3 days...that too if you are fortunate enough...whatever you want to do, do it now...because till when this state will last...neither you know much nor can I speculate on it...)

I have no intentions to make this a grandiloquent note. The irony is that India remembers its soldiers only at war. All I intend is, to make you ponder on the other side of a fauji’s life. The side, which often gets overlooked, by one and all. What it is to be with men in uniform. What the family members feel when their heads are midst fire. This is not a tone that rings in my home alone but is conspicuous in thousands of families where the men have adorned the Greens.

When the ‘dil’ (heart) itself starts rotting, the very existence of the body gets in grave danger. Gone is the time and gone are the days, when India must have felt proud of its citizens. For when she cries, few step forward to wipe her tears. But the ones, who try, get too soon forgotten by their beloved countrymen. Hats off to the modern medical science, the slowly rotting dil can still be operated. Let’s hope that the operation kick starts, lest transplant remains the only option for survival!