Before I turned quasi-Buddhist and all that as I grew into my semi sober capitalist adulthood, I had very big crush on armies, and war fighting. I suppose this has always been stage of development in boyhood, in which boy playing out their fantasies of imagined dangers and easy heroics. My setting was a ditch at the back of my parents' home. They needed dirt to level something or the other elsewhere as a part of some home improvement project, and this left me with that ditch at the back, under the shade of a couple of coconut palms, and a lemon tree. This was in eight-ninth grade.

So in the years when kids (or in marketing speak, tweens), here in the US, busy themselves in the various protocols and rituals of adulthood, I was in that ditch, literally, playing with dirt. I fashioned elaborate structures, battlements, roads, etc; the wonders that can be wrought from some water and clay. The scenarios that were played out were numerous, starting with battle scenes from Tolstoy's "War & Peace", the various useless wars India and Pakistan fought in the last sixty or so years, and of course the crucible of World War II with settings borrowed from the large dose of war based pulp fiction - Alistair MacLean's "Guns of Navarone" comes to my mind right away - I was eagerly consuming around that time. At that them I also harbored not an insubstantial dream of getting into the Indian Military's equivalent of West Point, N.D.A aka National Defense Academy (visit to read some florid prose on the intro page, such as "The intrepid cadets of yesteryear have not only proved their mettle as military leaders in combat but also blazed a trail of glory in several other fields across the national firmament." - how can a mere boy resist this!).

Sadly, much of this mental predilection was cured by a compulsory year long spot of N.C.C which every male freshman at the college I went to had to undergo. Undergoing endless drilling with a surprisingly heavy Enfield rifle in hot and humid Bengal weather, taking a dump in a trench latrine, going on a run at the crack of dawn followed by a dose of group calisthenics on Saturday mornings, having a shotgun nearly kick in the ribs as well as induce temporary deafness in those few comically bad shots I had to take at supersonically fast clay pigeons in a skeet shooting exercise etc pretty soon quieted all this ardor for war business in the mind's Western Front.

Yet I suspect this war virus still lurks somewhere around inside my head for I still eagerly read about armies (recent read: the well written and recent survey on the spread and reach of the US military in Robert Kaplan's "Imperial Grunts"), histories of past battles especially World War II (a recent post on this), and track the latest weaponry and gizmos at Jane's. The only way I can explain this internal contradiction is by pointing to the amazing amount of violence in the work of scholarly J.L. Borges - his knife fights and toughs are very beautiful.

[Aside/Request: Can any historian reading this point me to a good reference on the history of the British Indian Army, which comprehensively cover the various wars Indians fought for the Empire? It would be a great help. I am specifically interested in the role of the Sikh regiments that fought in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. Thank you.] ...

Given this, I feel great affinity to the subterranean person called Gary Brecher who writes a very witty bi-monthly column called "War Nerd". I would recommend it to anyone else that likes having some war in their reading trail mix. Here are some fine excerpts from an old column on that old Kargil business at the Kashmiri LOC:

"Naturally, there were casualties on both sides -- and when the Pakistanis handed back the Indian dead, the corpses were mutilated, eyes and penises missing. At least that's the way the Indian newspapers told the story. Who knows if it's true? What we're dealing with here is good old war propaganda, and nothing gets the home folks excited like mutilated corpses. It goes all the way back to the Iliad, with Achilles dragging Hector's body around tied to the back bumper of his chariot.”

"And the Indian press pushed the Kargil story as hard as it could. India is a huge, messed-up country with more than a billion people speaking more different languages than there are in all of Europe. You have to work damn hard to keep a place like that united, and the simplest way is to get them mad at somebody across the border. Kargil was like the Alamo for Indian propaganda -- kind of a sacred last stand."

"By the time the Indian Army spotted these mysterious infiltrators, they were dug in on the high ground. Not a good position to be in, if you're the Indians -- kind of like Bunker Hill, if it was on top of Mount Everest. Attacking uphill in air that thin, while the defenders shoot and shell you -- man, that's my idea of hell."

In a ugly parking lot Arms akimbo in a drizzle, Eyes scanning the horizon Where heat lighting flashes And grins, my happiness Stands with my solitude Drenched in a moment Of grace, as Haydn* pours Cello notes out from A passing car window to End this fiery summer day.

*Must listen: Haydn's Concerto for Cello in C; here is a cello god, Rostropovich, tearing through the 3rd movement: Part 1 & Part 2