Delhi kids stage play on futility of war

The play revolves around Capt Abhimanyu, an expert in decoding electronic messages, who virtually runs away from home against his parent’s wishes after just a day of vacation, driven by his sense of duty, after he hears that a war has broken out. In the battlefield, theyoung officer confounds his superiors with his ideas about how birds, fishes and even the fragrance from the valley of flowers do not stop at the Line of Control (LOC) created by mankind and come right across. Not against defending the motherland, the message the protagonist seeks to convey is to question the very concept of boundaries between nations, which leads to war.

It also brings out the great traditions of Indian Army where captured prisoners of war are treated with dignity by the young captain despite the killing and mutilation of his soldiers by the enemy.

The play also calls on people to respect the soldiers who do not hesitate to lay down their lives to defend the motherland, as young Capt Abhimanyu does, trying to bring down the fence that denotes the `LOC’.

In a message to countrymen written in his diary, the martyr asks the “unknown citizen of the future world” to “learn not to commit the mistakes of this generation” and “erase these lines of confusion… Based on the insecuritiesand selfishness of the mind.”

Although sounding more like the American army with a `Sergeant’ in place of a saab and highly accented language, the play does bring out the best of Indian Army’s traditions as also the humour in uniform.

A wounded soldier is raring to go back to the battlefield and tells the sister at the base hospital “I consulted the soothsayer, the astrologist and the palmist about when I will be able to go back to the front.”

And before the sister can say something on how “useless” the exercise was, the soldier shoots back, “…And they all asked me to consult you, sister.”