15 March 1977- Happy Birthday Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan

My favorite line from Caesar:

"Cowards die many times before their deaths,

The valiant never taste of death but once."

“Do not come up, I will handle them”, were the last words which Major Unnikrishnan told his men, as he was hit by bullets while engaging well armed ruthless terrorists inside The Taj Mahal Palace Towers, Mumbai during Operation Black Tornado according to NSG officials.

It just seems like the waste of a human life to die in the line of duty, and I am not sure if I believe in this concept of martyrdom as much as I blindly did in the past. Sadly, not anymore!

I wish to celebrate Sandeep’s Birthday today, because he believed so strongly in something that he prepared to give everything, to see it survive. I venerate him and all the people who laid down their precious lives fighting for us to live on. They were the kind of people who are prepared to value something more than they value their own life.

I am sure the object of his belief is something we can appreciate, we naturally must glorify those who give their all for it.Today, it hurts me real bad because, I see a majority of us who dismiss even a memory as untrue, or unworthy, and then we often dismiss their sacrifice as well.

Sandeep fought until finish, he endured the pain, 

for he knew  not just he would gain 

The battle is over is the victory won?

A soldier makes his journey home. 

Sandeep fought so hard, He fought so long. 

And now, he sings a victor's song when the rest of the world goes MUTE! 

We must STOP this indifference! A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil even life and death.
Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?

Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive!

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an END. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, for the one whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The hundreds of martyrs --forgotten, exiled them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. This for me has been one of the most important lessons of the experiments in good and evil I have experienced day after day. In the country that I come from, my society is composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders, the largest majority unfortunately belonging to the third category.

What about the abused children, raped women, martyred soldiers, terror victims? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the newspapers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably.Soon we forget all of them.They become just another story in the distant archives of our memory.

It is so much easier to look away from a sacrifice. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, and our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbors are of no consequence. Therefore, their lives are meaningless! Their anguish is of no interest. 

Indifference has reduced Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan to an "abstraction." 

If we continue this indifference, mankind will perish. I see Sandeep’s face every single day, his placid eyes, his cold and lifeless body appeals to me every single minute! I hear Sandeep’s parents and their silent pleas,pain striking eternal injuries... Do I feel their pain, their agony? I die every single day with them.

Yes, every minute I die, imagining the indifference to a martyr. Not just one  -- so many of them -- could be saved just with a caring thought.With a few good memories lived year after year.After all the lives we live are the very same they laid down!

Happy Birthday Sandeep Unnikrishnan!