1973-A Santiago, Chile. Dinner for President Allende at the Indian
Embassy in Santiago. From left to right President Allende, Milena Luksic
de Marin, Hortensia Busi de Allende, wife of Chief of Army Staff, author. |
“The phone rang so I picked it up to hear
Allende’s voice. He said, ‘I am calling you on the most difficult day of my
life. We shall fight all day.’ Then he must have put the phone down.”
'I felt that 7.30 A.M. was not a good time to ring up anybody. The only
unusual sound I heard was of planes flying overhead. Whom should I ask? I
decided to go to office as usual and make phone calls. The problem was that
my diplomatic colleagues would be divided and would only have news favouring
whichever side of the iron curtain they were on. There was no Indian
involved in politics. My Chilean friends although generally opposed to
Allende were non-political and would know nothing. It did not seem a good
day to call Chilean officials or politicians.'
|
1944 London, In R.A.F. uniform. |
'A couple of days later, I was in Cosford. The
first problem was my turban. The other cadets were given little strips of
white cloth which fitted in their forage caps and distinguished them from
‘other ranks’ as cadets. I treated my turban as a ‘hat’ and pinned an R.A.F.
brass badge on the front of it. One Officer seeing me in a corridor asked me
if I intended to keep my turban and beard. My answer was, “Yes, Sir.”'
......
'What was the work of disarmament? We would receive intelligence reports
of the place where weapons or warlike material was supposed to exist. ....
'One day everybody became quite excited when the Intelligence report was
about ‘aircraft factory’. We had visions of a well concealed aircraft
factory in the middle of the Lower Saxon Countryside which was not at all an
industrial area. The map reference was very specific and as we got nearer I
was expecting to see at least a railway line. However, what we found was a
village of about a thousand inhabitants only slightly bigger than other
villages I had been to. I went immediately to the mayor who denied all
knowledge of any factory. After cross-examining him I took him to the map
reference where we found the village blacksmith’s workshop. It was bigger
than others I had seen and the owner was there to answer my questions. He
said that he had had a contract with the German Navy to make torpedo nose
covers. He showed us a sample. It looked like an unusually broad aluminium
bucket. It was designed to be placed on the front end of a torpedo when it
was stored in a submarine. Apparently German torpedoes had detonators at the
front end designed to make them explode on impact. The cover was to
eliminate the possibility of an accidental explosion during transportation
or storage.'
|
1971 Lima, Peru. Presentation of credentials to President of Peru in the
presence of the Foreign Minister and Aides-de-Camp. |
'......
After that we entered Peru and then there was a petrol pump which had a sign
FILL UP HERE YOU WILL NOT FIND ANOTHER
PUMP FOR THREE
HUNDRED KILOMETRES. The road runs near the coast but we were warned that we
must carry drinking water and rugs because if the car breaks down, one can
get dehydrated in the daytime (temperature up to 40 degrees Celsius) or
frozen at night (temperature down to -40 degrees) if there is a wind. We
were booked to stop that night at Artca but when we got there at teatime
Kirat went to inspect the kitchen and said it was dirty we could not
possibly stay there so we got back into the car and the night fell ten
kilometres later as the road left the coast and climbed into the coastal
range – the latitude was 15 degrees South.'
|
1955 Buenos Aires, Argentina, at a display of Indian fashions organized
in co-operation with the Union. Left to right - Kirat, an unidentified
Argentine, President Juan Domingo Peron, author and the President of
Secondary Students Union, . |
'... However, South American dictators are
usually removed by a golpe (coup d’etat) and with increasing corruption and
abuse of power by the President’s friends, the time seemed to be drawing
near. With the death of his charismatic wife Eva in July 1952, he had
acquired a reputation as a womaniser. This would normally be an asset but
the women became younger and younger until he founded an association of
secondary students who got various privileges like the use of one of the
Presidential residences. He thought he would reach out to India as a
non-aligned country because he wanted to get away from the U.S. apron which
usually covers Latin America under the name of the Monroe Doctrine.' |
