Written by Ashish Chandra The day two of the Pune International Literary Festival 2021 (PILF), saw a discussion on the valour and sacrifices of the Indian soldiers under the title of the session, ‘Brave Hearts of the Country’. The two guests invited for the talk were Lieutenant General Satish Dua, former GOC of 15 Corps and, Kulpreet Yadav, a retired Commandant from the Indian Coast Guard who is today a novelist, screenwriter, and an actor. The talk was moderated by Geetanjali Joshi, a Marathi writer. Lt Gen Dua, who had headed the ‘surgical strikes in September 2016 against Pakistan, recalled that all his life, he was “involved in counter-terrorism operations, especially at command positions and therefore had a first-hand experience” of the life of a soldier who undertook such dangerous operations. He has written about his experiences in his book ‘India’s Bravehearts: Untold Story from the Indian Army’. According to him, the aim behind this book was to tell the unreported stories of Indian Army soldiers as well as to motivate the youth to join the forces. On being asked about the struggles he faced while writing the book, Lt Gen Dua said that he had to do a “tightrope walk as these are sensitive topics and not everything can be put in the public domain, yet one doesn’t want to lose out on the authenticity by cutting out too much.” Lt Gen Dua also paid rich tributes to late Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat, saying that in him we lost a “great son of India.” Rawat along with his wife and 11 others were killed in a chopper crash earlier this month. The next speaker Kulpreet Yadav spoke of his book: ‘The Battle of Rezang La’. Recalling that he had no experience of writing any "military history and military non-fiction book”, Yadav said he took up two and a half years to research the battle which was fought during the 1962 war against China. Yadav stated that he had “heard about the story during his visit to his village in Haryana”, as most of the soldiers came from the "plains of Haryana" but couldn’t find a definitive book on the battle. When asked how he struck a balance between the actual events of the battle and fictional dialogues between the characters, Yadav said that “conversation help make the descriptive part more alive”, but he was very careful in “not including any conversation which is fictional.” The intention behind this approach was to “convey facts in a more interested manner”, he concluded.
