The Drive

On February 14th, 2019, as News of the Pulwama attack flashed on the television screen at Ajmer airport, Umesh Gopinath Jadhav, 38, who along with his band members, was waiting to catch a flight back to Bangalore, after performing at a music show, got queasy. As the body count of the martyred soldiers started rising, Jadhav, became more uneasy and found himself asking, “What am I, as a civilian, doing about this?”  After arriving in Bangalore, he decided that he would not write R.I.P (Rest In Peace) on social media. Instead, he would drive down and visit every single family who had lost either a father, son, brother, husband or grandson, in the Pulwama attack, and offer his condolences to them, in person. “As an ordinary citizen of India, this is the least I could do for them,” he says. That was not all. He also decided that during his visit, he would collect soil from the homes of the martyred soldiers where they had grown up as well as from Pulwama where they had lost their lives, and use it to build a map of India. Jadhav, who originally hails from Aurangabad, Maharashtra, has a Masters degree in Pharmacology.