The General's Age

Just a couple of days before he filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court under Article 32 of the Constitution, General V.K. Singh the COAS, is reported to have said that he had not thought of moving the court till that time. I think that was a totally misleading statement.General Singh must have been contemplating this move for a long time.He must have planned his move meticulously because he had earlier submitted a statutory appeal to the government. He is not a green horn that he did not know what fate his statutory appeal would meet.In ninety nine percent cases the statutory appeal filed by officers of the defence forces  personnel is rejected. Mostly the appeal is against the supersession of the officials. The G&A branch of the Ministry acknowledges the appeal and sends it to the concerned force i.e.the army or the navy or the air force for comments.The force in almost all cases re-iterates the position  and the Ministry generally agrees with that. In some cases the reference returns to the Ministry after the chief has seen it i.e. he has agreed that the supersession is justified. It is unlikely that the Chief  of the Army Staff did not know this fact. Then why did he submit a statutory appeal?              He submitted it because he knew that if he went to the Supreme Court without  first exhausting this channel, the Court would throw out the case without even bothering to go into its merits.
.People are criticizing A.K.Antony the Defence Minister that he has not evinced enough sensitivity to this important issue. Yes, Antony is like that.He just can not think for himself but is guided entirely by his personal staff. If this means disregarding the views of even the Defence Secretary, so be it. His earlier stint in the Union Cabinet as the Minister of Food and Civil Supplies was anything but remarkable.Officers of the Defence Ministry by now know very well what calibre their Minister has and also why he is there.
The question is what happens to the General if the Court chooses to dismisse his petition? Will the government sack him?This is the first time that an army general has thus embarrassed the government. So would he go unpunished? I don't think this government would punish him directly but he may be denied any post- retirement sinecure appointment. The situation will become more piquant if the General succeeds in his endeavour,i.e. he gets a favourable verdict from the Supreme Court in the next four months i.e. before the 31st May 2012 when he would superannuate.He will then insist that he be allowed to continue as the Chief till May2013. Then each day that he is in the office, he will be a thorny prick to the government in general and to the Defence Minister in particular.Will  the Minister be asked to tender his resignation then?Perhaps not, as Mr. Antony is the Defence Minister of the country not because the PM wants him to be the Defence Minister but because someone else more powerful than the PM wants him so. Who is bothered about the demoralisation of the armed forces that Antony's continuation in the office entails?.I wish Iwould prove wrong but I have a feeling that if there is an external aggression on the country today, its defences would crumble just as a bridge made by corrupt contractors and venal engineers crumbles.
If General Singh succeeds in his efforts and continues till 2013, the loser will be not only Lt. Gen. Bikram Singh who is likely to become the COAS (if General Singh  retires now i.e. in 2012), but also the Government of the country. There will be a complete trust deficit between the Government and the General for a period of one year. Officers who would have got their promotions as a consequence of General Singh's superannuation in 2012 will now have to wait for one more year. Some of them, including Lt. General Bikram Singh would even retire as the age at which the officers in the armed forces retire is linked to their rank--,the higher the rank, the farther the date of superannuation.So there will be quite a lot of heartburn if General Singh gets one more year as COAS. 

Terror of a Purana

It is customary among some of the Hindus to organize a recitation of the Garuda Purana within  the thirteenth day of the death of a member of the family. In fact the Hindu scriptures also enjoin this. It is part of the rituals that are required to be performed by the family of the departed.The Puranas are the texts comprising tales and adventures of some divine personages or the rishis. Thus we have Vishnu Purana, Shiv Purana, the Bhagwat Purana ( the story of Krishna),   Narad Purana etc. All these puranas tell the story of the divine personages i.e.Vishnu, Shiv, Krishna, Narad etc..The Garuda Purana is a little different in that it is not the story of the adventures of  Garuda, who, according to the Hindu sacred books, is the vehicle of Vishnu and is a bird-- a hawk with supernatural divine powers.But the Garuda Purana does not describe the adventures of this bird.It is but a dialogue between him and his lord viz. Lord Vishnu.
In the book Lord Vishnu tells Garuda what happens to a person after he gets out of his mortal body.Sixteen chapters of the book describe in detail how the person is transmuted first in a being with dimensions of a hand and then with dimensionsof a thumb.The description of what he undergoes is a tale of unqualified terror.The reader is taken through  paths paved with all kinds thorns, burning coal, boiling oil and incessant beatings. A normal middle class man who attaches far more value to the written word in general and the word of a scripture in particular, is bound to be filled with extreme terror when he is told what fate he is going to meet in the nether world.There is a detailed description of various kinds of sins and the punishment each of these sins entails There is a strong emphasis on doing good which generally means giving out liberally mostly to brahmins. It is enjoined upon the the person whose father has died and who is performing the rituals after his death for salvation of his soul  that he should give so much to the brahmin conducting the ritual as would be sufficient to meet his needs for the entire year to come.
I think it is because of the Puranas such as the Garuda Purana that there is so much anger against the brahmins. When I , a brahmin myself, felt so strongly against  the author of this book, it is easy to guess the amount of angst the non-brahmins are likely to have against it. And it is not against this book alone.It has become generic i.e.against all the so called sacred books of the Hindus.And since the books were supposed to have been written by the brahmins, the ire has got transferred against them i.e. the brahmins. Today the brahmins are the most despised group of people in the country getting the blame for everything that is wrong with it including the ascendance of Dr. Manmohan Singh as the prime minister. I think that the books such as the Garuda Purana are responsible for this kind of antipathy to a considerable extent. But the lesson should not be missed. Sins of forefathers do visit their sons and grandsons, otherwise, we the brahmins of today would not have to suffer for the deeds of our ancestors.But the fact that the people are still asking a brahmin to read the Garuda Purana, even today i.e. in 2012 christian era  following the death of a member of their family speaks volumes about the vice-like grip that the religion has on our collective psyche.

Bharat Bhushan Uniyal (1943--2011)

Our father Shri Mohan Lal Uniyal lost his wife just a few years afterhis marriage leaving no issue behind.Father resisted strongly the pressure from his elders and relations to get married again. But the pressure continued unabated. Infact the pressure increased when father built a huge house in the village.      One of his cousins thereafter  asked whether he i.e. my father intended to spark a quarrel amongst the cousins and their sons over his share of  the property that would have no owner once he departed from the scene. Finally, arguments such as these prevailed and our father , twelve years after the death his first wife got married again to a girl who was almost nineteen years his junior.It was not a compulsion for the girl's family because, at that time in the society , such marriages were taking place, and people did not mind marrying off their daughters to older grooms provided the latter were from a good khandan i.e. a respectable(sic) family.The girl in question is now our mother Gayatri Devi .Bharat Bhushanji was born after about one year and ten months of this second marriage.
Since a male child who would be the heir of the father was born, there were bound to be celebrations, especially as the long gap between the death of father's first wife and the marriage with the second had created some kind  of negative  atmosphere.
Originally the proud father named his son as Bharatendu Pratap Mohan but the teacher in the primary school made it  just Bharat Bhushan because he felt that the name was rather longish.
Bharat Bhushanji, though not a bright student, managed to get through his junior high school without much of a hassle The problem began when he had to be sent out to a place called Chamba a small habitat which boasted of a High School.(This Chamba is not to be mistaken with a district of the same name in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh).Sensing that Bhaiji had fallen into bad company at Chamba as  he could not pass his 10th Board Examination even after  two attempts, our father wisely sent him to stay with a  cousin in Dehra Dun, a well known town of north India, famous for its many assets including the  Doon School and the Indian Military Academy.
Dehra dun was the place where Bhai saheb spent a larger part of his life.He was doing his graduation from the DAV College.His younger brother Suresh Mohan Uniyal, the next in the line of siblings, was also with him in the final year  as the Bhaiji had to repeat the 10th class more than once allowing the younger brother to catch up.
Then, when the two brothers were going to sit for the final examinations, a major calamity struck the family. Our father, the sole bread earner of a large family, died  leaving behind  our mother, five sons, two daughters and two female cousins and their widowed mother i.e. our aunt. Apart from crops from a small tract of unirrigated  land there was no other source of income for the family. Father died in March 1962. The younger brother i.e. Suresh Mohanji  got a job with the Survey of India onthe 1st of January 1963 and the elder one i.e. Bhaiji in July of the same year. Bhaiji's job was with the Defence Accounts..             Both the brothers continued to  make sacrifice for the cause of the family--bringing up the younger brothers and sisters, getting the cousins married , paying the school and college fee of the siblings, performing the final rites of the aunt, who had died meanwhile, and all sorts of activities necessary to survive in the India of 1960s and 70s.
Bhaiji got married in1970 and soon thereafter moved his own way leaving the younger siblings to fend for themselves. But the younger brother who was also in the job continued  to mentor his younger siblings. Then the younger brothers also got jobs and the sisters too, got married and the family dispersal got underway. I got into the Central Government Civil Service . The next of the siblings..Arvind joined the Indian army as an officer and after some time the youngest brother too managed to land a job  with a nationalised bank Except for a brief stint in Morar near Gwalior, Bhaiji stayed mainly in Dehra Dun, first completing his M.A. in English literature and then succeeding at his Section Officers' Examination conducted by the Defence Account department. During the concluding years of his  service tenure he managed a posting in New Delhi, mainly with a view to providing a better education to his two children...a daughter and a son.Just when he had about two tears to reach sixty years the prescribed  age of superannuation from the Indian government service, he  quit the job, purchased an apartment flat in one of the housing societies of Delhi and settled there.In the mean time,his daughter got an MBA degree from a London based university and  entered matrimony.The son stayed with his parents and  continued that way.
On  the 27th December 2011 Bhaiji gave up his mortal body to join the immortals. It was a heart attack that took him away.Before that he had suffered a mild stroke causing a serious impairment of his speech faculties.
Bhaiji will be remembered by us for many of his qualities and many of the things he did.While at Chamba he mastered the art of playing marbles and along with one Jaswant Singh ruled the Chamba marble scene We learnt marble playing from him. Bhaiji was interested in the lives of the great men. He loved the fact that Hitler was also born in the month of April and on a date very near his own birth day perhaps thereby convincing himself that he too could be as great  as the Fuherer. He learnt palmistry by studying the books written by Cheiro and Comte de St. Germaine. He would read his own palm and also those of his brothers and friends. He also learnt astrology and learnt to interpret horoscopes and natal charts but here  he trusted only the Indian system and not the Western one.. In the village where we were born there were no clocks and watches at that time with the result that our horoscopes and charts used to be cast mostly by guessing what sign would be rising at the time of birth.A cousin from the village had cast his horoscope showing the Jupiter in the tenth house. Since the traditional books on astrology extolled such a combination skyhigh, Bhaiji became ecstatic because he was then convinced that he was destined  to attain a high  position in life.We also learnt astrology mainly from the books he brought and we are indebted to him for this. But we are more indebted to him for opening our eyes and ears.  He inculcated in us either knowingly or what is more probable, indeliberately, a love for reading books---books of all kinds including detective fiction. The result was that our horizons were widened and we learnt to see things in perspective, making us more rounded personalities and , I daresay, better human beings.He could never spell it out but he knew ,perhaps instinctively, that a way out of the wretchedness of life in India for people like us was  through education and through being better than many others, the evidence of which was your success at  a competition He himself appeared in a couple of competitive examinations showing us that even we, the poor village folk coming from one of the most backward areas of the country can make it good to a certain extent.
Yes, he was quirky too. He believed the written word as if it were gospel truth. He had a false notion of his physical and intellectual powers--he would not mind accepting the challenge to fight a wrestling match not only  with his collegue Virendra Badoni but also with a professional wrestler. Guided totally by emotion he would take it to heart if somebody  proved him incorrect on facts.But he was all kindness and forgave unconditionally.
Bhaiji, wherever you may be .kindly accept my 'pranams' a hundred times and a thousand times.I know that your soul, if there is a thing like that will certainly find the place it so much deserved.