‘Lost dad to war, want no one else to’

Rachna Khaira

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, May 2

“I still remember the fateful day of August 7, 1999, when my father Captain Mandeep Singh’s body, draped in the Tricolour, arrived at our place. Everyone cursed Pakistan for ‘killing my dad for no reason’. I, too, cursed the ‘Muslims’ and wanted to kill everyone of them living here in India,” said 19-year-old Gurmehar Kaur who, with her sense of purpose, has left everyone speechless in a recent video posted on the YouTube, wherein she is seeking peace between India and Pakistan.

The video, directed by Mumbai-based ad film maker Ram Subramanian, was also shared by many in Pakistan with Urdu subtitles. How come this sudden change of thought? “You cannot live with hatred all through you life! With time, I realised that it is not the country or the people but the circumstances that make you form an opinion,” said the national lawn tennis player who, after her father’s death, began to hate everything that she could associate with Pakistan. “I used to get frantic on seeing green colour, mosques and even began to hate men for some strange reason, which I could not understand till date. Once when I was five-year-old, I even picked a wooden stick from a nearby shop and ran after a woman who was clad in Burqa at a local market in Saharanpur,” said Gurmehar.

The little wonder has also written a short book in the memory of the fateful day of August 7, 1999, when her father’s body, draped in the National Flag, arrived at her place. “Everyone was crying and cursing Pakistan for killing my dad. I was barely three and I pointed towards the coffin and asked my inconsolable mother what was that. She replied it was a ‘dream’ and I would keep on calling a coffin as ‘a dream’ in my first picture dictionary for the next few years,” recalls Gurmehar. Why made her appear in the video? “During the recent terrorist attack on the Pathankot airbase in January this year, I happened to see the funeral videos of Lieutenant Colonel Elambulassery Kalarikkal Niranjan and his widow KG Radhika, accompanied by their 18-month-old daughter. 

It was like watching my own story once again. I saw myself crying in his daughter Vismaya. I posted a message on the Facebook which was read by Ram Subramanian; a Mumbai-based creative art director and my Facebook friend. He invited me to Mumbai and after hearing my story, planned to shoot a video instantly,” said the girl. She said it took almost a week to shoot the video. “Though we put the video on the YouTube, it did not get many views initially, but then there were some likeminded people in Pakistan associated with our ‘Profile for Peace’ campaign and hash tagged it. We even made ‘I love Pakistan’ and ‘I love India’ frames on the social site and exchanged it with our Pakistani counterparts,” said Gurmehar. She said she was happy that the video had received over million likes and was shared by people from both countries.

What next? “I want to make every single effort that could help bring peace between both the countries. There are already so many Gurmehars and Vismayas on both sides of the fence and we do not want more who would have to live their lives without their fathers. We all look alike, have similar tastes and understand each other’s language. There is no reason to be enemies and I will make every one understand this,” signs off Gurmehar.