There is a particular stillness that comes over you when you read about a soldier who never expected to become a legend. Not the cinematic stillness of slow motion and background music—but the quieter kind, like standing before a memorial and suddenly realizing the name on the stone once laughed, argued, trained, worried, and chose duty anyway. That was the feeling that stayed with me while reading Para Commando by Deepak Surana, the life story of Captain Arun Singh Jasrotia

I opened Stories of Courage on a day when nothing dramatic was happening in my life—and that’s exactly why it unsettled me. No crisis. No breaking news. Just an ordinary day. Yet within a few pages, the ground under that ordinariness began to shift. Not violently. Gently. The way perspective changes when you overhear someone else’s truth on a bus or at a café table. You keep reading, but part of you has already gone inward, recalibrating what you complain about, what you fear