Tags:
Journalism of Courage
When one of his abductors put a gun to his head,Vilas Bardekar thought he was going to die. He didnt. The gunman was playing a prank.
Bardekar is now home,a free man. But memories of those 81 days and nights in captivity,of being watched by gun-totting young men who could have put a bullet in his head without much thought,of sleeping rainy nights in a forest under a sheet of polythene,of going hungry for days,still haunt him.
Bardekar,who was in Arunachal Pradesh to do a study on butterflies,was abducted by alleged Bodo militants on May 12. It was 8 pm and I was in my room looking at the photographs of butterflies I had clicked. Suddenly,some young men thumped on the door and dragged me out of the house. They initially thought that I was a reporter who wanted to write about their village,but got to know who I was through local TV channels, Bardekar recounts.
One of them put a gun to my head and said,Udaa doon kya? and started laughing. I thought that was it. But they never repeated that joke.
It could have been worse,Bardekar says,had they not gotten to like him. I used to draw pictures of rare butterflies that I spotted in the jungles. Once,I drew a picture of one of the militants,they liked it and asked me to draw others sketches as well, he recalls. After I began losing weight,they started giving me breakfast,lunch,dinner and tea.
The captors talked with Bardekar in Hindi. They were between 19 and 26 years old,great fans of Bollywood heroes and crazy about Sachin Tendulkar. They were tech-savvy and played Bodo songs for me. Of late I had started liking those songs, Bardekar says.
And finally after 81 days,they released him,reportedly for a huge ransom. They held my hand and said,Uncle hamein boora mat samajhna. Bhabhi or behen ko bhi hamari taraf se sorry bolna. They kept saying sorry, says Bardekar.
From the seventh day after being abducted,Bardekar began writing a diary for passing time. I am going to make into a book, he says.
