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Wildbuzz | Parable of the paratrooper
PM Modi's wreath-laying at the IPKF Memorial resonates with veterans, while Col Bhadauria shares his adventurous IPKF and commando experiences.
PM Narendra Modi’s act last week to lay a wreath at the IPKF Memorial near Colombo has gone down well with veterans, who nurse a feeling of being caught on the wrong side of war history. But apart from that, Col RS Bhadauria (retd) has some wild memories of his IPKF tenure as a young officer of the 10 Para (SF).
Bhadauria also commanded fighting troops in North Kashmir in the 1990s and Batalik operations of Kargil as CO, 10 Para (SF). His stealth, stalk and kill commando instincts were shaped early by shikar expeditions of childhood. A jungle parable narrated by his father wisened the young lad early on and Bhadauria shaped out as a level-headed paratrooper and leader who revelled in commando missions.
“My father would always counsel me: never be proud of anything you have. He would narrate the parable, of a stag, who narcissistically loved his antlers’ reflection at the water hole. One day, dogs chased the stag. The stag’s thinnish, unglamorous legs made good speed but the antlers got entangled in an overhead bush. The stag stumbled, dogs caught up and killed it,” Bhadauria told this writer.
“As a commando, one hunts the enemy in forbidding jungles like a patient shikari. We used to lie in wait for terrorists in Kupwara forests by setting up ambushes for 10-15 days at a stretch, merging with the terrain. In Lanka, I did a bit of game shooting between battles with LTTE. Once, I shot a Lanka stag for some camp fire meat with the service issue, M16 carbine. I chanced upon a crocodile basking on a rock in a Lanka lake. Using the M16, which was super for long-range, I shot the big croc. It was difficult to retrieve it but I got our divers to extricate it. I had the skin cured and the head made into a trophy but the croc was stolen from our mess! I did get into trouble with my commander for using the M16 for croc shikar!”
Bhadauria and his retired Army medic wife, Madhu, shoot tigers with a camera. Bhadauria gave up killing creatures after his IPKF stint. “I renounced shikar then because I realised nothing matches the thrill of hunting armed men, who can hit you back real hard.”
Ball for birdies not the birds
For those citizens unacquainted with golf and not having access to the haloed greens of elite indulgence, a glimpse through the proverbial fence can afford mysterious spectacles involving wild ‘members’ of the clubs. Not to mention, the voyeuristic, passerby luck of seeing golfers throwing to the winds their gentlemanly airs and indulging in a brawl that sees caps, hats and turbans tossed up like an explosion from a bunker shot, and golf sticks productively used for whacking everything other than the balls of golf!
On Wednesday last, Anuj Jain, a Sector 17 apparel retailer and an award-winning wildlife photographer, chanced upon a tussle involving the scavenger species, a black kite. The bird was, equally, bewildered having not realised that golf balls are manufactured so hard nowadays that these would even spite the crunching jaws of his majesty, the Royal Bengal tiger. To the uninitiated but imaginative eye, the bird seemed to be playing soccer with a ball in the middle of a golfing preserve.
In Jain’s words: “While I was driving, I noticed through the fence a kite in the practise fairway of the CGA Golf Range behind the Sukhna lake. The kite seemed to be toying with a piece of cloth. I stopped my vehicle to take photographs and all of a sudden a ball came rolling down the range and came to a halt right next to the busy bird. The kite grabbed the ball. Assuming it to be an egg for relishing, the kite tried to break it and open its ‘contents’ with the hooked beak. After trying hard, the kite gave up and went back to fiddling with the cloth. I take this road along the CGA Range nearly five times a week but I have never witnessed a kite indulging in such strenuous efforts to prise open a ball.”
Golf balls are not always dealt with on ground by guileless birds. Eagles, coucals, ravens, crows etc grab them from the fairway and make quick with the dimpled, white lovelies to a perch. Alas, a snack in vain, for little do they know that golf balls are designed to bag maximum of their namesake, birdies, eagles and albatrosses, and avoid giving too much play to duck hooks!
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