There’s a moment in every Indian household connected to the armed forces when history stops being a chapter in a textbook and becomes deeply personal. Sometimes it arrives through an old photograph in uniform. Sometimes through a trunk filled with fading documents. Sometimes through the way a father falls silent when a war is mentioned on television. While reading From Reveille to Retreat by Lt. Gen. S. P. P. Thorat, I kept thinking about my father. Around the time the clou

Some books arrive quietly. Others arrive carrying the sound of engines. While reading Wings of Valour by Swapnil Pandey, I found myself thinking not just about aircraft slicing through the sky, but about a pair of grease-stained hands from another era — my father’s. My father served in the Indian Air Force, working on the maintenance of the legendary Douglas C‑47 Dakota. Growing up, I never saw the aircraft he worked on. What I saw were stories — fragments told over eveni