My Father…not just a father..! To me he is not a personality, just my father. Yet when I close my eyes
to think of my favorite personality ahead of Gandhiji and Mandela both whom I admire tremendously, my father’s face strongly asserts itself into my mind. What is it that makes this man special? Of course, any girl’s first hero is her father, that’s a given. But if you have a hero for a father? That is special. So, I write about a fabulous human called Raghavan and you for sure would wish that you had met him by the time you finish reading this.
DTM Rekha Utham
Born into an illustrious feudal land-owning family, highly anglicized, peppered with innumerable personalities who live in history books, my father was the 11th child of my grandparents and youngest amongst
three sons. He lost his father when he was barely five and was brought up by his mother whose regime was strict. He was a mischievous boy and a notorious teenager. The anecdotes about his mischief during school days would fill a book easily. When he was in high school, he and friends set fire to the office block because their exam papers were in there waiting to be sent to parents. He feared his mother’s wrath more than anything else in the world. At the age of 17 he ran away from home and joined the British army. Despite the family using its influence and flexing its collective muscles, they didn’t succeed in bringing him back home. So, he lived a common soldier’s life when he should have been lolling around in his palatial home in Kerala or getting ready to go to Cambridge or a local college like the rest of this siblings for further studies.
19
As a young soldier in the British army, he broke all the rules and regulations and as is their custom he was fined. At the end of the month because of the heavy fines he would get a few quarters only as salary. That change he would throw back at the quartermaster and wait for his mother to send him money for sustenance. Air dropped into the jungles of Burma, shipped to the shores of Singapore, he fought in the second world war. Like millions of unsung heroes who lived and died chivalrous and valorous lives. Bundled into the deserts of El Alamein in Egypt in the chilly wintry days of November he was lost for seven days in that desert. He dredged the terrain for sustenance, crawled his way back to the camp on one leg, the other being gangrenous with bullet wounds, with valuable intelligence on the German locations and spent the next 3 months in hospital. His mother had remarked as she watched the falling leaves from her favourite almond tree that something has ...
