Rest assured, Vikram Misri will not mind being told he is no Shah Rukh Khan. He will also not mind being told he is no Aamir Khan or Salman Khan. Yet during Operation Sindoor, the 60-year-old's popularity was soaring faster than a BrahMos missile and dwarfed that of the three Khans, who incidentally are almost as old as he is.
This was for a reason, at once simple and increasingly rare: the Indian Foreign Secretary became the man of the moment, because following Kipling's sage advice, he kept his head while all about him were losing theirs.
Misri's mastery of his brief came when many of the already hotheaded TV anchors had turned totally rabid, even spewing the choicest of abuses on primetime TV! Sleep-deprived journalists like us in online media, meanwhile, were left scrambling for the crumbs of information we could retrieve from the fog of war every day and night.
Into this daily circus would step a composed Misri, head and hair in place, as the oasis of reason.
We must acknowledge that the Foreign Secretary had the advantage of being well-briefed. But still to say the right words, to avoid getting carried away in the slightest and to exude Zen-like poise while doing so counted for a lot.
Sun Tzu in his classic treatise The Art of War noted: "It is the unemotional, reserved, calm, detached warrior who wins, not the hothead seeking vengeance and not the ambitious seeker of fortune." Going by that wisdom, Misri, with his immaculate presence, won the briefing war for us.
He was helped in his endeavour by his two new lieutenants, Colonel Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh, who also brought discipline and dignity to the mix. These were two officers who must have battled their way to get to where they were and had done so in the finest manner possible.
To see them all being celebrated was heartwarming. Grace is astounding and India thankfully didn't need a hymn to be reminded of this. The mindless cacophony clogging the airwaves at other times was more than enough, thank you.
Coming back to Misri, it is illuminating that despite beginning his career in the ad world, he prefers to shun the limelight whenever he can.
His glittering career, which began with his entry into the Indian Foreign Service in 1989, had seen him serve as the First Secretary at the 2001 Agra Summit between Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and President Pervez Musharraf. Hailing from a Kashmiri Pandit family and having grown up in Srinagar, Misri had attempted to do his bit to bring calm to the valley by 'putting in late hours even after everyone else had retired' at the grandest India-Pakistan peace summit ever.
He was serving as Ambassador to China in 2020 when the clashes in Galwan erupted and is said to have played a crucial role in keeping the conversations going. Fittingly, when India and China agreed in October 2024 to disengage troops, it was Misri, a China expert, who made the announcement as Foreign Secretary from the Indian side.
Offering another glowing testimony to the 'thorough professional' is his unique record of having served as private secretary to three Prime Ministers -- IK Gujral, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi. The lover of crime thrillers was the Deputy National Security Advisor (Strategic Affairs) from January 2022 to end-June 2024. He took over as India's 35th Foreign Secretary fifteen days after leaving that role.
The fan of Al Pacino's Dog Day Afternoon might have many more dog days awaiting him since he is in the hot seat till July 2026 at least. But trust him to continue to go about his job in the most gentlemanly of ways. What a relief that is!
