Personal touch, overarching concern, simplicity

I had not known what a deeply compassionate human being the President of India was till late in the evening of June 3, 2004, when a young surgeon from the Remount and Veterinary Corps called to give me the news of a two-and-a-half-hour-long surgery he had performed a short while earlier. And the story which emerged from the Rashtrapati Bhavan does proud to the legacy of Emperor Ashoka, unarguably India’s first head of state whose writ ran over the entire sub-continent.

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Among the “Edicts” handed down to us by the Emperor through etchings on prominent rock-faces in 247 BC —  “through Rock Edict I, Ashoka forbids animal sacrifices...” — he had embodied the care of wildlife as an instrument of state policy. Notwithstanding Ashoka’s intent, as a people this injunction has regrettably remained the least of our concerns. So when an incumbent of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (in a sense the elected successor of Ashoka) reaches out to an animal in distress moved by impulses of compassion, it is surely an occasion for celebration.

Now, on June 2, 2004, out on his morning walk in the Mughal Gardens, President APJ Abdul Kalam found an adult peacock crouched and inert by the side of a bush while hundreds of others on the Estate were active with the dawn chorus. Observing carefully, he noticed a big lump wedged between the mandibles and over the right eye of the peacock. There and then, the resident veterinary surgeon of the 44 Military Veterinary Hospital located on the Estate was spoken to by the President over the cell-phone and the ADC was asked to remain by the peacock till the arrival of the surgeon. 

On examination, Major Y Sudheer Kumar found a cancerous tumour lodged in the mouth cavity, which was also pressing on the right eyeball; the bird could neither eat nor drink and its vision was blanketed from the right side. As a result, the stricken bird had wasted, was acutely dehydrated and the surgeon concluded that it would perish without immediate surgical intervention. 

After thorough preparation, surgery was performed the next day and all vestiges of the 3 cm wide by 4 cm deep tumour “along with its stalk originating from turbinate bones” were successfully removed; 48 hours later, the peacock’s mandibles regained functions, it took to feeding and what was even more gratifying, the sight of its right eye also seemed restored. The President looked visibly moved when on the seventh day the surgeon handed the peacock to Dr Kalam for reintroduction to its natural niche. Surely, the happy news must have spread among birds, mammals, reptiles and all other creatures of India’s wilderness by way of the “jungle telegram”, as envisioned by Rudyard Kipling’s setting in The Jungle Book, and all denizens big and small went rushing to the “Council Rock” to pass a vote of thanks to President APJ Abdul Kalam! “That peacock would in all likelihood have died had the President not spotted it on time. And thereby hangs a touching tale.”

 When a story is too good to believe, it becomes a fable. This one from the Rashtrapati Bhavan surely will in times ahead. As a matter of fact, about two months ago, Ravi Singh, the CEO, WWF-INDIA, had called to enquire about the whereabouts of Major Sudheer Kumar because a veterinary doctor in the USA wanted details at first hand as he had a similar case on his surgery table!

My sense of Dr Kalam as the “People’s President” is derived from the fact that he was empathetic to the efforts of other Indians striving for the greater, common good. India is home to the tallest flying bird in the world, the Sarus Crane, but as with all other species, Sarus too is being pushed towards extinction by rampaging “development”. In 2002, its last and the most viable breeding ground in the Ettawa-Mainpuri region was chosen by the local politicians to site an airport, posing a threat to its long-term survival. When all efforts to save the Sarus habitat failed, I wrote to the President soliciting his intervention and within days (August 27, 2002), I received his reply: “Dear Gen Baljit Singh, I am indeed delighted to receive your letter. I have noted your concern for the vanishing Sarus Crane. I am having the matter looked into.” 

Thankfully, the project was disallowed in good time!

As far the “Missile Man” is concerned, I had my first and only direct interaction with Dr Kalam in my office at HQ, Eastern Command, Calcutta, in 1991. The Army HQ had made a special budgetary allocation to expose officers on current issues of concern through “guest speakers”. So I wrote to Dr Kalam if he would share with us the status of the Integrated Missile Project and his vision for the future. He accepted the invitation promptly and following Services protocol, he was received by a Staff Officer and guided to my office. I had not understood at all the personal lifestyle simplicity of this man till we shook hands. 

Of course, he was dressed in his trademark open-collar shirt worn over modest trousers and his feet shod in strapless, flat leather chappals but the moment I showed him to a sofa-chair, he immediately slipped his feet out of chappals and sat down  cross-legged, folding his legs at the knees upon the sofa-seat! Totally un-self-conscious of his posture, he launched into the history of his project in hand. In time, he accepted the offer for a cup of coffee and in between utterances he would transfer some coffee from the cup to the saucer and slurp it, nonchalantly!

His talk to the officers assembled in the auditorium was brilliant for its content and a “teacher” that he was, he made extensive use of chalk-n-board to write equations and draw diagrams of trajectories and so on to convey his message in common parlance, to perfection. To my enquiry as to how much lead in time we had over Pakistan in this sphere, his prompt and confident reply was “at least four years”. He was applauded and even mobbed by officers as he had no doubt charmed them all with his honesty of commitment to what he believed in.

We hosted him to a formal lunch in the Command Officers’ Mess. Although we had correctly imagined that he would prefer boiled rice, sambhar-n-rasam, but beyond that we had simply not guessed his “native” eating ways. Once again, Dr Kalam adopted the same sitting posture as in my office and taking his seat on my right, he took a good helping of rice-n-sambhar, lifted all cutlery from around his dinner plate, neatly piled it aside and with complete concentration and in total silence took his meal using his fingers! We were all aghast by this definitely the first-of-its-kind lunch eating performance in the Mess, but at the same time humbled by the deep-set personal living convictions of a self-effacing, great man of our times.

The writer was on the Board of Trustees of WWF INDIA & Advisory Committee of Bharat (Bombay) Natural History Society