Readers' Views on Umesh Chandra

We thank all the readers who have sent comments. The website maintainers appreciate the positive feedback, more so all the errors caught by the readers. However, we will only be publishing messages written about Umesh Chandra. Folks, please keep the comments coming.

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The following messages were received by us on Umesh Chandra.

Former classmate at HPS, Vinai Kolli writes to Purnachandra:

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?