Sagar used to pen this for the Lahore-based Urdu daily, Adab-e-Mashriq, from a sanatorium in Kashmir as he awaited death from TB. To his astonishment, he realised this was Ramanand Sagar, the celebrity writer of Maut Ke Bistar Se or Diary Of A TB Patient. When the furious pilot threw open the trunk, out flew not currency notes or jewellery but pages of Sagar’s unpublished novel Aur Insaan Mar Gaya, said to be the most poignant story on the bloody Partition. Even as the Dakota DC-3 hovered above the ground waiting to take off with the refugees while the howling of bloodthirsty tribals of Waziristan could be heard coming closer, there was a face-off between Patnaik and Sagar over a trunk that the latter refused to offload before emplaning. Did you know that Biju Patnaik, two-time chief minister of Odisha and father of Naveen, the incumbent, was a daring fighter pilot? If yes, then you’d probably know that he was a pilot with the Royal Indian Air Force during World War II he delivered what was perceived as subversive literature to Indian troops, flew clandestine missions ferrying Congress leaders to and from safe houses, and was the adventurous friend Jawaharlal Nehru sent to fetch Indonesian resistance fighters from under the nose of their Dutch colonisers for a secret meeting with the Indian Prime Minister in Delhi.īut what I bet you didn’t know was that it’s his derring-do in Srinagar on Diwali night in 1947 that saved a man you and I know as Ramanand Sagar.
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