On 22 September 1965, a 26-year-old Indian Air Force squadron leader, in his Hawker Hunter fighter jet, ejected after a hail of Pakistani groundfire near Lahore ripped through his jet. Captured and taken as a prisoner of war, he would be repatriated four months later. But even in the fraternal landscape of the military, the young pilot was known for his illustrious lineage. He was “Nanda” Cariappa, son of a former Army chief who would go on to become India’s second Field Marshal, Kodandera Madappa Cariappa.
Now nearly 80, the Air Marshal lives a very quiet retired life in the hills of Karnataka’s Kodagu (formerly Coorg) at his famous father’s verdant hill abode, Roshanara, nestled between rolling hills and Madikeri town.
Cariappa Jr. and his wife Meena don’t have much time for politicians or politics, but couldn’t have been surprised when the Field Marshal’s name was invoked at a rally by Prime Minister Modi to shame the Congress, an attack that has erupted into an unsurprising controversy of its own given the errors that embellished the broadside.
For the Field Marshal’s son though, there are more urgent things to attend to than political quarrels in their state. Cariappa Jr. did, however, attempt to draw Prime Minister Modi’s attention last year, but it was to an issue that occupies the Cariappas above all else — the ecology and environment in Kodagu, the birthplace of the Cauvery, a river that local communities, including Cariappa’s own Kodavas, consider sacred.
‘Only God or you can save the Cauvery and the environment in Kodagu,’ the Air Marshal wrote in a letter to the Prime Minister in March 2017. He received a protocol reply inviting him to raise the issue with the Secretary of the Environment Ministry, and rues how the brief exchange could be indicative of a deep-rooted indifference to environmental emergencies in the country.
India Today found the Air Marshal has other concerns on his mind too, closer in keeping with his own life and career — the diminishing lure of the military upon youth in Kodagu, considered the ‘Land of Generals’, a district that has supplied generations of tough officers to the three armed forces, but primarily the Army. The Kodavas, native to Kodagu, were designated a martial race by the British in a list that included Sikhs, Marathas and Gorkhas.
“Unfortunately the lure of the armed forces has come down considerably. I’m aware of fewer young men and women who are keen on joining the army, navy or air force. It is certainly less than before,” Cariappa told India Today.
Serving on the Coorg Wildlife Society that fights an uphill battle to conserve the environment in the face of rampant tourism and commercial development, Cariappa’s eyes mist over when he’s asked what he’d like to say to the young generations of Kodagu, and indeed the rest of the country.
“All I would say to the young generation is that there is no finer profession than that of arms,” he said. “You have a sense of belonging. You live in a community where everyone cares for everybody else. Whether its at an air force base or on a ship or an army cantonment. In big cities, you may live in a ten story tower and never know your neighbours. You couldn’t care a damn. But here it’s all for one and one for all. Today the only binding force as I see it, is the integrity and loyalty engendered by the armed forces. There’s nothing else that compares.”
source: http://www.indiatoday.in / India Today / Home> News> India / by Shiv Aroor / Madikeri – May 04th, 2018
