Is this the way we treat our
heroes?
Not everyday does a person walk in and decide to lay down his life for
the love of his duty towards the community. Needless to say, we are honored
and fortunate enough to know such a person in our life time and he is
nobody else other than Umesh Chandra. Umesh was a person who got a kick in
his life by laying it out all, who never had second thoughts about his
goal. His goal was to make a difference. This by no means an ordinary
goal. This goal requires one to have a tremendous amount of mental and
physical grit. Great are those individuals who have achieved this
goal. Even greater are those mothers who nurture this spirit. It takes an
extraordinary amount of courage to raise a child with such ideals and keep
him focussed on those ideals. As a society it is our minimum responsibility
to safe guard and encourage such highly spirited individuals.
It took just 33 years for Umesh Chandra to raise to such a level. We as a
society have failed Umesh Chandra. Failure on our side is just an under
statement. Umesh chandra was transferred out Karimnagar for no fault of his
own, to a position within the city of Hyderabad, where his security was
totally compromised. This gave the bad elements pretty much, an open
target. Umesh Chandra fell pray to a planned assassination and a cowardly
act by the same bad elements who feared him when he was the SP in
Karimnagar. Transferring him out of Karimnagar due to political reasons has
incapacitated him to perform at his best. Though he considered resignation
at that juncture in his life he stayed committed to his work primarily due
to his higher goal of making a difference. In fact he gave us a second
chance by not resigning, even after being put through such a humiliating
experience by our politicians.
Here is a person who laid his life for us and made our world a better place
to live, and we as a society don't even provide him with security to
protect his life. We lost Umesh chandra today primarily due to criminal
negligence and total apathy towards his security needs. How can we justify
ourselves and sleep well every night after we have failed him so
miserably. Putting it rather bluntly today we have Umesh's blood on all our
hands.
It is just not Umesh Chandra who got killed, we executed the whole spirit
of being able to make a difference. What is the message we are sending to
those Heroes in the making? Should we tell them, "Your effort is not
appreciated in our society". What are we conveying those who have the
passion to make this world a better place to live? How can we be so callous
and turn a blind eye to these jewels of our society on whom we depend upon
so much?
Yes, we are indeed embracing technology and modernizing as fast as we can
but how can we quantify that as progress, when there is no guarantee that
even police officers are safe in the streets of Hyderabad. We are just
trying to build a house without laying the foundation. What is the message
that we are sending these bad elements? Are we telling them that yes it is
OK for them to inflict terror and they can get away?