Saluting Our Heroes: The Param Virs of Bharat

This series of posts on Param Vir Chakra awardees on my blog Satyameva Jayate was prompted by a winding but thought-provoking conversation I had in the summer of 2009 with a friend and his cousin – a young serving officer in the Indian Navy. We talked politics Jammu & Kashmir 26/11 bribery corruption and Pakistan…until talk got around to attitudes of young people towards the army and the general lack of interest in a career in the armed forces.The young naval officer felt that at least part of the blame lies with our attitudes towards “heroes”. As a society and as a nation we rarely honour our men and women in uniform and do not value their valour enough. He pointedly asked me how many of us can name even five Param Vir Chakra awardees let alone all of them? I confessed I could not.That question haunted me for several months.In October 2009 I decided that the heroes deserved a series of their own. Starting November 2009 I began writing a post on each one of our Param Vir Chakra awardees – the bravest of the braves.The project to publish the series in the form of a book emerged out of various conversations with friends and blog-readers who were very kind in their praise and encouragement for this work. It would have however remained just an idea had it not been for the thankless and untiring efforts by Umadevi Desabhotla who volunteered to help organize each of these posts into chapters format spell-check and proof-read them. I am grateful to Vinod Subramanian and the amazing designers at Chirpy Elephant They took on this assignment pro bono and we got the design you now see on the front.