Kargil — A humbling experience for journos

Consider what happened to a reporter, who, after particularly tough day, sauntered into the hotel’s dining hall.

"Khana lao (get me food)," he ordered Bodhraj Sharma from Jammu, who is the hotel’s bearer, purser, cook, waiter all rolled into one.

The hotel’s owner, Mohammad Fida, ensconsced in the public call office, runs in the hotel.

"Khana to khatam ho gaya, pehle kyon nahin bataya (the food is over, why didn’t you not ask for it earlier)," chides Bodhraj in his slurred, almost inaudible speech.

"Arre, is this a hotel or what. How dare that obstinate moron… refuse me food," cried the reporter, in near-desperation. But the reporter had learnthis lesson in time: He was hard telling Bodhiraj the next day, "Bodhrajji, aap to hamare annadata hain, aap ke bina hamara kya hoga (Bodhraj Sir, your are our lord of food, what would we do without you."

A technician from a government-run television channel had some disagreement with Fida and had to forgo his shirt following a deathly duel down the "grand staircase" of the hotel.

While returning from Kaksar, a taxi came under heavy shelling. The driver, used to the "fireworks", kept his cool, and even had a word of advice for a woman photographer who quickly rolled up the window pane in a vain bid to protect herself from splinters.

"If you see it, rest assured it has missed you, and if it hits you, you’ll never know what happened back on mother earth," the driver said.

"Please roll down the glass because it may break by the sound of a shell," he said, adding, "Don’t worry, trust your luck."

As shells landed each morning and evening on the hill across the raging river Suru, the journalistteam, armed with their cameras, would gather on the balcony, and the more seasoned among the tribe would explain the sequence of shelling. The `novices’ would run out of their rooms every time a boom was heard, while the veterans would teach them how to distinguish between incoming and outgoing artillery fire.

"If you hear reverberations along with the boom, it is an Indian shell, but if you hear just the boom, wait for the whizzing sound as it is a Pakistani shell going past. You will hear a second boom when it hits the hill."

Another journalist was saved by a peg too many. He woke one morning, later than usual, to find that his bathroom door would not respond to his nudging.

A loud rendition of abuses made his neighbour knock at his door. "Look, some bloody… has got into my bathroom and is not even speaking up," the photographer, an early bird who used to spend a good hour during the peak shelling hour on his "throne", shouted.

The neighbour pushed the bathroom door hard, only to find it had beenreduced to rubble by a `gift’ from Pakistan that morning. The damage was visible in the neighbour’s bathroom too — he could have the luxury of a hot-water shower as he shaved, because a hot-water pipe in the ceiling above the washbasin had cracked!

Communication facilities told a story of their own, with a few lucky ones sporting iridiums, and the lesser mortals spending hours blowing into the recalcitrant telephone lines of Fida’s PCO.

A novice, while speaking to his wife one evening, blurted out, "Oh sh.." as a shell whizzed past and landed nearby with a loud boom. The phone got disconnected at that juncture and what happened to his wife for the next hour when they were united by the Department of Telecommunications needs no description.