REACH FOR THE SKY

REACH FOR THE SKY

Napoleon once famously said that the word 'impossible' should be removed from the dictionary. As a child we all are little Napoleons. We intend to conquer our world of ambitions. So it was with me!

At the age of six I was riding an adult bicycle. At thirteen I was unlawfully driving a six cylinder Land Rover and I was determined to fly an aeroplanes as soon as I was allowed to get into the cockpit. That is the way young boys are ! No sugar and spice.

I soon found myself in the university hostel. Here I came across an affluent, suave, strikingly handsome boy from a top public school ( these schools, exclusive and expensive, are perhaps known as private schools in USA). It was his humility that set him apart from other elite-school boys. The disdain and the arrogance was altogether missing. He was absolutely at peace with himself and with the world. As I look back through the mist of time his eyes had the compassion that reminded me of Jesus!

This RDJ, as I would prefer to call him here, was a member of the local flying club. He would often come late for dinner into our hostel dining hall and then over the meals expansively tell us the direction he went flying that day and the cities he flew over. How I longed to be in his shoes !! He gave me a bestseller paperback "REACH FOR THE SKY ", a saga of awesome courage of a never-say-die British boy who joined the RAF as the clouds of the second worldwar were building. He soon lost both his legs. This boyhood hero of RDJ, the 'legend' named Douglus Bader, got himself artificial legs and came bouncing back into the war as it broke out. He gave such a hell to Hitler's aircrafts that he was knighted by the King !

I came over to another university for the post graduate programme and he went his own way. Much water had flown down the Thames bridge when, early one morning, a small news item at the bottom of the front page of the newspaper caught my eyes. And it numbed me.The report said that, while in the process of negotiating his aircraft for landing on an aircraft carrier, a young officer of the naval airforce crashed. He was RDJ.

Unlike his childhood hero, he did not survive the crash and he left a lifelong wound in my heart. His favourite book, REACH FOR THE SKY, is still with me as I look back through the intervening decades to the life and times of the one and only RDJ.

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