Symbolic sortie

There are myriad associations and images evoked by the word sortie. Derived from the French sortir,literally meaning to go out but connoting as connotation-loaded words in the quantitatively limited French vocabulary do a pre-determined,specific objective. It conjures up depictions of sorties into Occupied France during World War II for instance,missions that donated the word to popular discourse with an almost exclusive,and severely reductive,reference to aviation. You think of those daily nocturnal flights,every pilot knowing he might not be returning to base. Or you think of Antoine de Saint Exupéry,writing the meditative Flight to Arras on his sorties during the war and then disappearing on one offshore Marseilles in 1944.

The original associations of aerial sorties,although not very happy,are nevertheless of a dangerous but necessary adventure,of presumed heroism. Perhaps part of the reason is the fact that flying and going to war are the last boundaries of human experience in most societies.

Today,we are long-accustomed to sorties in non-combat situations,meaning routine flights from air force bases. But President Pratibha Patil donning a G-suit and flying on a half-hour sortie in a frontline,multi-purpose fighter jet a Sukhoi-30 MKI from the family of Indias most advanced fighter jets just under supersonic levels amounts to a fully fledged adventure on a personally heroic scale.

In India,political and statutory figureheads arent usually celebrated for their native adventurousness or sportsmanship. At what cannot be called an age of advantage,Pratibha Patil may just have enriched the symbolism of her office. Only one president her predecessor A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had flown in a fighter jet,another Sukhoi. In doing so,President Patil has associated herself,and her country,with a distinctly exclusive club.