Major Mukund Varadarajan AC (12 April 1983 – 25 April 2014) was an officer in the Rajput Regiment of the Indian Army. In 2014, he was posthumously awarded the Ashok Chakra, India’s highest peacetime gallantry award, for killing three terrorists in an encounter at the Shupiyan district of Jammu and Kashmir.
On April 12, 2014, Major Mukund Varadarajan turned 31. Early in the morning, his father Varadarajan sent him birthday greetings on (the mobile messaging application) WhatsApp, to which there was an immediate thank you response where he said he’d call in the evening. Which he did. And then, as always, he spoke a little to his father and a lot to his mother.
But one of the messages he sent his father was a secret.
“He told me he was going to take leave for ten days and come home in the first week of May. He wanted me to keep it as a secret from his wife Indu. He wanted to surprise her.”
A few days later, on April 25, he came home a few days early… in a coffin.
- Varadarajan, Major Mukund’s father, worked in a public sector bank, but many of his cousins were in the Indian Air Force. He too wanted to join the IAF like his cousins, but was dissuaded from doing so by his parents because he was their only son. “When his son expressed the same desire he had always harboured, he couldn’t say no to him. He supported him wholeheartedly. “Even after having lost my only son, I don’t think my decision to support him was wrong,” says Varadarajan. His mother Geetha was not at all happy with Mukund’s decision. She told him he was her only son and should be with her.
- As Mukund was so passionate about joining the army, Varadarajan thought of admitting him to a Sainik School. But he had to abandon the idea when he was transferred to Alappuzha from Thiruvananthapuram. After school, Mukund got a bachelor’s degree, and then a master’s in mass communication and journalism. His father thought he had forgotten about the army. But Mukund surprised his parents by taking a Short Service Commission after spending a month working in a call centre. He passed out of the Officers Training Academy with high honours in 2004.
- Once he joined the army, he would call home every week and talk to his mother for hours. “I wanted to know whether army life was like what we see in films. I wanted him to tell me about his life in the army. But he would say, ‘You don’t need to know all of that. I know you want to tell your neighbours everything. There’s no way I am going to let you do that.” He would also say, ‘I miss all of you. It is only now that I understand the value of family’. Whenever he spoke about missing his family, I would immediately tell him that this was why I didn’t want him to go out there. But he never liked me saying that. The army was his life.”
- Whenever his mother complained about not being able to see him regularly, he would say, ‘At least I come home a couple of times a year. But most soldiers cannot go home even once a year. Think of those mothers. You are lucky.’
Major Mukund Varadarajan’s bust unveiled at Officers Training Academy - “He spent two years in Lebanon on a United Nations mission and then another six months in Kashmir. The poor lad could spend just six months with his daughter,” his mother says.
- The officer who accompanied Major Mukund Varadarajan’s body home told his parents, ‘Mukund’s last words were, “Please take care of my parents, wife, and child” — words that will always echo in his parents’ ears.
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