Everyone, young kids included, is deeply concerned about environmental pollution these days. My twelve-year-old granddaughter’s objection to a candle march in protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act was that lighting thousands of candles would not be entirely smokeless. Earlier, she insisted on a smokeless and noise-free Diwali. She had refused to light even a simple sparkler because even that would emit smoke. My apprehension that she might object to her grandma lighting an incense stick during Lakshmi Pooja that evening, reminded me of a day in 1963 when as a cadet in the National Defence Academy, someone had explained the meaning of ‘too much of a good thing’ to us.
As air force cadets in the final term at NDA, we used to assemble at the glider drone for exhilarating powerless flights in a glider. Gliding smoothly up in the air we derived much sadistic pleasure from watching our army counterparts crawl through grimy barbed wire and dicey ditches with marching order packs on their backs. Flight Lieutenant Amanullah Khan was our instructor from the Air Force Training Team. He kept us thoroughly amused by his public display of love and hate for his Triumph motorbike as he showered choice abuses on it if it failed to start in half a kick.
Flt Lt Amanullah surprised us one day by declaring that he won’t be using expletives for one day and we too were required to put up a show of “officer-like”conduct. This veneer of gentlemanliness was required in view of the planned shooting next day of a Hindi film at our gliderdrome. The film Sangam with the legendary Raj Kapoor and Vaijayanthi Mala cast in the lead roles was bound to be a huge box office hit next year. Our eyes shone with excitement as we learned that the scene to be shot, the hero Raj Kapoor, would fly a two seater aeroplane. Meanwhile, he would be singing a romantic song and would steer the plane into a sharp dive to upset the heroine Vainajayanthi Mala. But we, the potential Air Marshals of the IAF were, under no circumstances to ogle at the film stars. Such cheap adulation would be unworthy of our status, warned Amanullah Khan.
We swallowed the instruction hook, line and sinker. As Vaijayanthi Mala kept shrieking ‘Nahin, Nahin, Nahin’ in successive retakes, Rajkapoor kept diving his little plane repeatedly. We the ‘respectable’ officer cadets steadfastly ignored the heartthrobs. The next morning, Amanullah Khan took us all by surprise. “You idiots, how could you treat the doyens of Indian cinema so shabbily? You could have at least given them a glance. Did you have to hurt the egos of the great artists by heartlessly ignoring them like this?” he asked, showering us with choice abuses that were reserved for his bike. That was when I learned the meaning of ‘too much of a good thing’.