The Flight of My Life

Welcome on board The Flight of My life.

“Biography (whether family or not) should focus on people’s obsessions and their flaws, on their passions and their extremes, for these are where the truth could be found,” said Zhang Dai (1646-1736).

Some have written that an autobiography is “a disease”, yet others that it is “the height of egotism”. Anthony Trollope is quoted to have said, ‘No man ever did so truly, and no man ever will.”[1]    Nirupama Subramanian[2] wrote “Autobiographies are mostly written when the author is no longer in office and has the luxury of time, introspection and hindsight. Even so, most such works offer justifications more than honest self-analysis.” 

Keeping these words of wisdom in mind this is, to the best of my ability, an objective narrative of events. The lessons that I have learnt are peculiar to me. How people treated me and how I treated them are by no means material for case studies. What I have narrated might or might not apply elsewhere or to another individual, even under the same circumstances.

I have relied mostly on the notes that I kept as well as discussions with the personnel I spoke to or who filled in the blanks when they found out that I was chronicling my life in the Indian Air Force (IAF) and partly on my memory. Many air, senior and junior officers, airmen (both retired and serving) have shared their experiences and insights, some of them asked their names be kept “off the record”. I have not quoted their names but have used what they said so that this narrative is more complete.   

I have referred to various media reports, articles and photographs[3] in my research and acknowledged them to the best of my ability. I want it understood explicitly that I am not plagiarising if I cannot attribute material to the right sources. It is simply because at that time I was not keeping notes as I had no intention then of writing this narrative. I have subsequently tried to trace back so that I might acknowledge the source but have failed in many places. 

Ranks, designations and nomenclatures in full form have been given with abbreviations in brackets the first time they are used in this narrative i.e. Indian Air Force (IAF); thereafter only abbreviations have been used as far as possible.

Oh, yes, I have to overcome the life-long habit of writing in the third person. It makes reading a bit tedious, but I promise I will try to avoid that as I go on.