Of Kapoor and Kayani

We are a nation of patriots. We vote our Indian soldier as our person of the year. We get all expressive and teary eyed watching the fauji movies and their stories of bravery and valor. But that’s about it. Something that has been irking me for a while is that while Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani is ranked among the “50 Most Powerful People of the World” selected by Newsweek, a leading American weekly magazine our Chief of the Army Staff Lt Gen Deepak Kapoor is nowhere. The list, carried in the magazine’s January issue, is led by President-elect Barack Obama while Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan also make the list but Gen Kapoor doesn’t figure at all. Gen Kayani is placed at 20 on the list.

I checked up the older versions of the list and was amazed that none of our high ranking Defence Officers have ever been on any such list worldwide. I don’t know what a difference it would have made but then are we a breed of miserable hypocrites? An unwelcome irony of this is that because of our jingoistic false ‘patriotism,’ and things have become far too dangerous and despised for all our soldiers. As a true fauji wife one of my first lesson was to complain less, to smile more and to cherish what I have today! For the past so many years I have been doing exactly this. But now I want more, a lot more for all my soldiers………