Slow and steady won the heart

Last Monday around 4 pm, the world seemed to come to a standstill. As luck would have it, Lalit Mohan Bansal, a sub-divisional engineer SDE with the Chandigarh engineering department and a bird watcher and naturalist to boot, was heading towards his office after a field inspection. Due to intense exchanges of artillery fire on the ridgelines and slopes, cordite residues had slowly poisoned the snows of the Batalik heights and the streams tumbling from them. Pakistani soldiers holed up on the towering heights would melt snow for water consumption. As the war progressed in India’s favour and the summer deepened, the snows began to melt and slip away, and whatever residues were left on the tops were affected by cordite poisoning.