BENGALURU: This Valentine’s Day in India was a horrible day for the CRPF jawans killed in their trucks by a suicide bomber. As the jawans trundled down those mountainous paths in the rickety old buses, crowding against each other, one wonders if there had been Valentine’s Day plans for all those young people and their loved ones back at their homes. Did some have internet video calls with their sweethearts earlier that day, or were planning to talk later in the day? Did others long to have a sweetheart or were just starting?
They certainly wouldn’t have anticipated that a 22-year-old would ram an explosive-laden car into their convoy, killing all of them. Whether it be through such horribly violent terrorist attacks, or like earlier in the month by the crash of a test flight of an upgraded Mirage flight that killed squadron leaders Samir Abrol and Siddhartha Negi in HAL, Bangalore, and hundreds more over the years, both in times of war and in times of relative peace, love can and does come to an abrupt end for so many of our people in the armed forces. Just in the last five years, we have seen many pilots lose their lives to aircraft crashes, ambushed CRPF jawans massacred in the heartland, terrorist attacks in multiple pockets on our borders, even one of our air bases.
What does one do if their loved one is so suddenly, violently and cruelly snatched away? For those losing a loved one in the armed forces, seeing their loved one come back draped in the national flag and knowing the violent end they met, how does one even begin to deal with it?
Loss is hard enough, and harder still when one is left loving someone who has so suddenly disappeared, and so violently at that. Loving someone is also learning to live with the fear of loss, especially in lines of service that are so exposed to mortality.
On this Valentine’s Day, the preciousness of this love, the awareness of its fragility and the pervasiveness of the fear of losing it gets driven home to not just those immediately connected with the jawans who lost their lives, but also for everyone else. We all take that hit for a second, and feel the pain of losing someone we love. We empathise with their families and loved ones, because we all share that fear of losing someone we love. We know how dreadful it is to even imagine such loss, and how we go through our loved lives imagining ourselves far from such tragedy and yet it strikes so close to home, and so often.
The beauty of such love is not so much in its eternal life, as much as it is in loving anyway despite the fear of loss, despite its fragility. We love even more knowing that it is precious and maybe we will ask more from those we can hold responsible to keep this love safe for Valentine’s Day and all the other days.
(The author is a counsellor at Inner Sight)