What are the wages of war? Major General (retd) Somnath Jha is more qualified than most to answer that question. A year ago, he gave himself the unusual mission of cycling two minutes for each fallen comrade. And there have been so many—20,600 soldiers have died in the line of duty since Independence—that his pedalling took him through all 29 states of the country. His odyssey, which covered 11,000 km, lasted just over six months.

“The Army is not a career,” he says. “It is a way of life. It shapes you, defines you and stays with you long after your duty to the nation is done.” Jha’s ‘Veteran’s Homage’, as he calls it, began on 19 October 2016, just 18 days after his retirement from Ambala Cantonment in Haryana. He was accompanied by his wife Chitra, a self-improvement coach who was also his personal motivator and the driving force behind his social media campaign.

While he cycled, she drove their car, taking care of the logistics of the journey. As they traversed seven to 12 hours a day, Chitra’s online following helped them find places to stay at night. The nights, in fact, turned out to be the highlights of the adventure—they were hosted at assorted inspection bungalows, Army camps and police stations across Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. Their most unusual stopover, he recalls, was a petrol pump in Jharkhand!

For 183 days, Jha pedalled through jungles and over mountains, in smog, fog, winter chill, icy rain and scorching sun. Some stretches were bare and unpopulated, others were bustling. “We only had a tentative route and a sketchy schedule,” he recalls. “My original reckoning was that we’d take 202 days to do my journey but we completed it in 183.”

At 58 years of age, it wasn’t all easy going. “In Arunachal Pradesh, my cycle skidded on some gravel and I injured my left knee,” he says. Not wanting to jeopardise the journey, he convalesced for three days before hopping back on his trusty bicycle. As he puts it, like any battle, “Once begun, it could only conclude after the mission of 42,000 minutes in the saddle.”

Though his journey wasn’t about visiting memorials, he met the families of many unsung heroes along the way, while ex-servicemen would stand in wait along his route, having heard of his mission. Other highlights, according to him, include Chitra singing Ae mere watan ke logon at the Town Hall in Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh; a race with boys from the National Cadet Corps in Udaipur, Rajasthan; and authentic Punjabi samosas in Phagwara. Also in Punjab, they met another duo, a father and son aged 48 and 16, who joined them at Beas and cycled with Jha all the way to Amritsar and then to Gurdaspur the following day, as their way of saluting the armed forces. “The father-son duo was special because when they heard I would be passing by, they bought themselves two bicycles,” recalls Jha. “They had probably never cycled more than 3-4 km before, but they cycled 135 km over the two days they were with us.”

By December, the media had begun to cover his unique campaign. There were rousing receptions, media interactions and motivating encounters with children and citizens along the way. “The love and adulation received from citizens in every nook and corner of the country was an emotionally humbling and physically uplifting experience,” he says.

In fact, Jha had wanted to pay his respects to India’s fallen heroes for a while but hadn’t known how. Inspiration struck when a video link appeared in his inbox showing how Mike Ehredt, a US Army soldier, had honoured his fallen comrades by running a mile for each of them. Jha settled on a bicycle as his medium.

His journey ended at the Amar Jawan Jyoti, New Delhi, on 19 April, this year, amid a stirring reception by the Army and well-wishers who had been following Chitra’s narrative of the journey on social media. “Paying my respects to every soldier who had sacrificed their life for independent India and its people was a huge emotional accomplishment for me.” Salute.

—Sahil Jaswal

Photo Courtesy: Somnath Jha
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
October 2017