You say war. I see uniforms folded before they grow old, boots that return without footsteps. You track borders lines on a map. I trace the cracks in a mother’s voice when the call comes. You speak of victory. I have learned there is none where someone has to wait forever. You count the fallen like numbers in a report. I count the chairs left empty at dinner tables. You will call it history one day. I will call it the day I stopped counting. You say never again. I have hear

Nation very recently lost a legend, an Air Vice Marshal with the Indian Airforce, an ace pilot, who was captured as a Prisoner of War in the 1971 Indo-Pak War. Standing there, during his last rites, with just his family and friends and officials from the Indian Armed Forces, I realised that the world particularly every Indian must know about this War Hero. So, here I am. I first met AVM Pethia in the early 2000s when we were posted in Bhopal, for my column ‘ Olive Green” in

A few nights ago, my phone lit up with a video of Gen. V. P. Malik, a man I respect almost as much as I respected my own father. A man whose integrity is unquestionable, whose leadership shaped an entire generation of soldiers. Yet as I watched the clip, my heart tightened. Something felt off. The words were his, the face was his, the tone almost his, but the soul was missing. I did what every Indian should do in that moment: I prayed that it was fake. And when I finally gath

Every other day you come across a news article or a socila media post where you see that veterans continue to struggle even for a smallest matter, which raises a very pertinent question, what if we had a political party of our own, a party comprising of only ex-servicemen and their kinfolks? Indian Army has more than 30 lakh ex-servicemen as of now, add to this, ex-servicemen of all the security forces and their families. We are huge family. If we have a significant politic