AFVOA Newletter August 2020

Section 5 - Memoirs CV 2 No. 02 / 2020 Page 116 of 237 worked in a similar job in Dubai till he was forced to return back due to family problems. I happened to meet both of them at the site and my only question to them was “How did you overcome the fear of height?” Both of them said that years of experience had made them confident but the fear of a fall always lingered in their mind. This reminds me of Para jumpers. I asked a few of them about their feelings before jumping out of a moving aircraft. All most all of them said that the sense of fear is common amongst them, till they have completed about a score of jumps. I am not wrong when I say that all of us fear death, be it our own or that of others. The fear of going near a corpse or things associated with death like mortuary, coffin etc., without any reason or rationality is termed as Necrophobia. But what beats me is the fear that people have, when they have to go near a dead body. There is always a bit of hesitation when persons are asked to pick up a dead body. You ask people the reason for their fear and they will not have a logical explanation. A person who is alive ceases to exist as a person the moment he is dead. He becomes a body – Dead Body. This fear is most unwanted. People need to understand that it is a normal occurrence in life. If birth is natural, an act of God and so is death. Here I am reminded of a famous quote of Socrates “To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.” Now the question comes up “Do People in the Armed Forces have no sense of Fear”? Here I would like to do some plain speaking – People in uniform, be it the Armed Forces or Para Military Forces or the Police are all basically human beings. They do have a sense of fear. Be it to fight the enemy, terrorist, anti-social elements, etc. the element of risk is always there. And where risk is involved, fear co-exists along with it. It is one’s preparedness, training and most importantly the Call of Duty that helps in overcoming fear. To quote General George S. Patton, “If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened” . It is rare (or should I say impossible) to find a person without some kind of fear or the other. People fear many things – cockroaches, snakes, flying, job interviews, rejection, first day in school, darkness, unemployment, unknown and many more reasons. The least fear I expected from people is the fear of dentist chair. While waiting for my turn to meet my dentist, I suddenly heard some commotion from inside his surgery. It turned out that an elderly gentleman had come for root canal treatment and the dentist was getting ready to inject local