Kargil

This name is trending today, more so now, than it was 20 years ago. Kargil day is gaining a celebrity status like our Independence day, all thanks to Whatsapp, Twitter and Instagram in our lives.

The nameless faceless soldier continues relentlessly, while some distinguished ones get the spotlight. He doesn’t get a selfie moment while he crawls and lunges across difficult terrain.He has not been to sophisticated schools to belt out monologues in chaste English on patriotism, like they do on TV these days. He just goes on, with the pictures of his dear ones tucked in his memory / mobile phone and the thumping of the batteries around him.

“`Forward the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.”

( Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade)

The Indian Soldier and soldiers world over are bred on this core value. When the soldier leaves home to battle it out on the fronts, the concept of the nation is highly personified. It takes the shape of his own home, his own family and his own property. He fights to save that. The soldier forges ahead on these thoughts pumping in his blood stream; you can call it adrenaline or “Josh” or morale… He will never question “why?”

👆That is for the intelligentsia who have been working overtime to mitigate boundaries in fiction and lofty speeches while they sit cocooned in the comforts of their homes, surviving on goodwills and honorariums. The boundaries continue, the conflicts take different shapes but the soldier is harnessed, the soldier is marched forward and he is not to question “Why“. Remembering Kargil today…