Only The Good Die Young
Today, it would be 18 years since my kid brother, the late Flt Lt Abhijit Gadgil, took off in his beloved MiG-21 over the Rajasthan desert, for the last time ever. Within 33 seconds, it as all over. A young, dashing, professional 27-year-old fighter pilot, husband, son, brother, friend, teacher, gentleman, officer was lost to us forever in a fiery crash in the desert sand, creating a huge glassy crater as his aircraft, suffering multiple instrument failure, took him to his death on a moonless night just a week after the infamous 9/11 in the USA, as the whole world prepared for something horrible to befall it.Then out spake brave Horatius, the captain of the gate "To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods."
Since then, every year, we have been visiting the Hut of Remembrance at the National Defence Academy in Khadakwasala, Pune, India, on this day, to lay white flowers at his name, which is one amongst the list of over a hundred souls that passed out of that Academy and made the ultimate sacrifice in uniform.
An interesting, though hardly surprising, fact I noticed today during our visit was the average age of the NDA alumni whose names adorn the list of bravehearts who gave up their lives for their country and died in harness. With a rare exception of a Brigadier or an Air Commodore, most were Lts, Capts, Fg Offrs, Flt Lts, Lt Cdrs, Majs, and Sqn Ldrs. It would seem most are between 22 and 35. Most officers beyond that seniority are not expected to be on the forefront of action.
The Motherland demands a constant supply of fresh young blood, and it is ritually and regularly sacrificed in Her glory by Her fit, strong, young men going off with a song on their lips and fire in their eyes, lured by the words of out of shape, soft, old men sitting well behind the lines in the safety of the very ideas they conjure up to send these young men to their deaths. Ideas of democracy & freedom, of laws & rights, of principles & ideals, ensigns & anthems, totems & slogans, and gods & ancestors, all equally lofty, all equally manmade, all equally worth dying for, all equally worth killing for, all equally worth everything, and at the same time, worth nothing. At the end of the day, the teardrop in the eye of the widow and the mother who cries at the casket as she is handed a flag, cap, and medals to remember her husband/son by, is the only reality. The rest is all just manufactured myth.
Wars are, as the well-known saying goes, old men talking and young men dying. Indeed.
Fauj is maya bazaar for dreamy, starry-eyed, bold and dashing fine young men, hormonally charged and virile, if I may add. Heck, they even used to show An Officer and A Gentleman as part of "indoctrination" (yeah, that was the actual official name for it)!
ReplyDeleteReality is what you aptly summarized above.
I spent a month in MH Pathankot in July 99 down with jaundice and spent those weeks with brave young men, some retuning from the warfield up north, some of whom who would forever live with colostomy bags and catheters and never walk again. I was 25 then, newly married, and quite traumatized and disillusioned because, as in Abhijit's case, a vast proportion of those injuries were during training or faulty equipment, easily avoidable.
Abhijit was neither the first nor the last officer with whom I had shared the dining hall a few hours back and shortly after, described as "small pieces of still warm burnt flesh" by the recovery party.