Author's Personal Note
I went to Ujjain in 2005. The samadhi was not on the tourist map of Ujjain, and it took me four hours, meandering through a funeral ground, to find the monument. But finally, I reached that sacred ground for all Kshatriyas!
I stood spellbound, looking at the proud Chhatri (memorial) of a real man. The passage of time and the patchy details of his story had not diluted the impact of Veer Durgadas on my being. I asked my auto driver to arrange for a broom. As I cleaned the place and removed the cobwebs, I called up my father, the late Karni Singh Ratnu, and he asked me to explain how it looked and if it was well kept! Both of us cried on the phone when I told him about the solitude and filth in which the grand old man’s memory lay there!
My father asked me to sit there and meditate for a while. The auto driver, a Muslim, came up to me with a bottle of water and asked, “Sir, is this the Chatri of one of your ancestors? I looked at him and replied, ”Yes! A chatri of our ancestor, both yours and mine!” He then heard the whole story. He folded his hands in reverence and then both of us cleaned the place. A small man, (by modern standards) had the wisdom to understand the value of timeless valour and loyalty, an understanding which evades our so called educated masses and intelligentsia!
We Hindus can never regain our lost pride and glory till we continue to be obsessed with pseudo morals of Ahimsa and peace. Men of honor have to fight for the truth to prevail in this wide wicked world. And the valorous are required to keep barbarians at bay from our motherland!
If one Durgadas could confront the supposedly mighty Moghul empire, imagine the fate of this country if even one of the Riyasats of Rajasthan had joined hands with him! Alas, that was not to be! And sadly, the same myopic attitude, and infighting continues today, when we live in this most dangerous place on this globe!
History never looks back kindly at those who do not learn from it !
Sharing this story with my friends, I got a response from a doctor colleague who said that she will read out this story to her son.
I wrote back to her — Yes, you must! No matter, what these Leftist historians might shove down our throat, you must tell him that he belongs to the race of the valorous and the loyal!
If we can stand up and clap for Western heroes like William Wallace, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, let our children look up to our past too with pride, and draw inspiration from the likes of Veer Durgadas Rathore!
Let them know that we resisted what was wrong, and that we chose to die than be taken as slaves, that we stood up, not for petty selfish gains, but for the motherland. From that confidence alone shall Hindus rise and claim their rightful place in the league of mankind!
Omendra Ratnu