After the 'summer of 99'

everything was normal (or rather assumed to be normal) during 'the summer of 99' , until our intelligence got solid proof that intruders were enjoying the warmth of Mother India, and war was declared...

yes i am talking about the Kargil war. everyone knows about the war... lots of deaths on both sides and the war was won by us(but it is definitely a black mark as the enemy had entered our home, hid themselves in position of advantage and attacked our soldiers)...

ok lets not talk about what happened in the war... lets talk about what people were doing when the war was going on...

people left aside all their differences(because inspite of all the differences we are all Indians), cast, language etc etc and did whatever they could...
school kids wrote letters to soldiers telling that we do care for the soldiers and really appreciate what they were doing. many events were conducted to collect fund. i also remember some restaurants had stopped serving sweets. their question was : "how can we eat sweets when our men were fighting at the border, giving their lives so that we would be safe, so that we could sleep peacefully at nights..."(hats off to you brave soldiers)

students at our school too wanted to do something...
a soldier from a neighboring village had laid his life fighting for us. naturally his family was mournful(may be the financial aid declared by the government took time to come, worse may be it is still on its way, filtering from Delhi to a village in Karnataka, passing through innumerable hands on its journey towards south. if so may be one fine day it might actually reach them)

there was a student's organization in our school called YSM young student s movement. we conducted a fun fair on a saturday, collected some money and went that village and handed over the money to the soldier s family. i do not remember how huge that amount was but it certainly feels good when you really do something...