HAVE you ever lain flat on the ground and watched birds fly? It is as if they are dancing to a song, a tune only they can hear. I remember my emotions clearly when I was launched solo one October morning in 1975 in an HT-2 at IAF’s Elementary Flying School in Bidar — I don’t know why, but I just kept laughing! To be free from mother earth, all alone and flying like a bird, was something out of the world.
Soon, the flying exercises became tougher and the laughter gave way to many a colourful dressing-down when I flubbed manoeuvres and my instructor was driven to his wits’ end trying to teach me. From the rudimentary HT-2, which had no electronic aids on board, we moved to one that had a fancy cockpit — the Kiran jet trainer. One radio instrument stood out — the Automatic Direction Finder (ADF) which served two purposes for us cadets. One, to home in on the radio beacon of the airfield, and the other to listen to songs from Vividh Bharti from All India Radio, Hyderabad.
Landing after a sortie, drenched in sweat while taxiing back to the tarmac — and Yesudas crooning ‘Gori tera gaon bada pyara…’ in the ears of a 20-year-old! There was another track, ‘She’s crazy like a fool, what about it Daddy Cool….’ Oh, those melodies of the 1970s, they just blew you over.
And then, I got posted to Jammu. The places around it — Akhnoor, Rajouri, Poonch, Chhamb — were all associated with the 1965 and 1971 wars one had read about in school. And here I came in 1978, going on sorties to these places. If you had Sqn Ldr ‘King’ Kahlon flying with you, you didn’t easily forget your trips. One that stands out was another ‘musical’.
My logbook showed Chetak Z-1410 for a trip to Rajouri. It was an early morning take-off for low-level navigation; on reaching Akhnoor en route, the ‘King’ said, ‘Let’s go down.’ We were pelting real low, eyes peeled for birds and trees whizzing by, passing Sunderbani town on the left, easing over high-tension wires and then dipping down over a small picturesque fort — with Asha Bhosle’s voice echoing in our earphones, ‘Yeh mera dil pyar ka deewana…’; the hit number from the then recently released film Don. I bet even Don would not have experienced such a thrill that this 23-year-old did in the cockpit that day.
It is a different matter that my wife is bored listening to this story every time this song plays, 45 years later. But, you see, for a pilot, flying is a song!