Unmanned : ( Of Grief And Faith)

I want Blood, I want Blood, the General said clenching his teeth, as he got down from the chopper; rotors still running. "Haramjade sir katke lay gaye"( The bastards cut the heads of our soldiers and took them away as trophies) he added as he reached the group of officers awaiting his arrival. Sadly, the soldiers of IA were simply not as cruel and being guided by their epics like 'Ramayana' and 'Mahabharata' and steeped in the traditions of 'Dharma' such barbaric acts were simply abhorred. "Unmanned is a novel both about the Army being unable to 'man' its borders effectively and the 'lack of courage' at all levels in its ranks mainly due to lack of training and the polity which was completely disconnected from matters military. The militants it is battling seemed to be better trained and motivated to strike at will. The novel centers on the principal ills viz training and optimum equipment; that plague this callous Army and the laissez faire attitude adopted by the polity and the lay public that lets it get away each time. The professional Army carried a lot of dead wood that served in the peace areas and withdrew in the operational areas. The internal policing duties have blunted the edge of a once glorious Army with the leadership now competing with the bureaucracy in becoming ever more corrupt. As the protagonist a helicopter pilot moves through the 'poor' Army and its rich cousins, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard it is evident that they are all working at cross purposes. The novel was inspired by the incident of militants from the neighbouring country crossing over from a unmanned border and a similar incident being repeated from the same border a decade later. This is a sorry state of affairs of a professional Army, which spends a few months in training and many in administering itself. My goal with Unmanned was to bring out the colossal wastages and the hollowness of the Army that seems so professional from the outside and help restore it to its pristine glory. It was like a large empty but gleaming Artillery Cartridge beautifully polished on the outside and almost completely concealing the charge bags (gun powder) inside. The quality and quantity of the gun powder inside this beautiful cartridge was never known to the outsiders and sometimes even the insiders. Gallows humour and ability to laugh at itself makes this novel one of its kind brilliantly exposing the reality of the 'professional' Army falling deeper into a morass. -Sudhir Pande

• | Author: Sudhir Pande
• | Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• | Publication Date: Jun 03, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 380 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1717294707
• | ISBN-13: 9781717294708