Shyam V Mankar

Terrorists attacked an army camp in Jammu while an officer's wife and 3 year old daughter were asleep inside. He went out to fight them. For almost ten hours his wife did not know he was already dead. His name was Major Akshay Girish, an army officer from Bengaluru and the son of a retired Wing Commander. In 2009 he proposed to Sangeeta on one knee with a red pen drive because he had forgotten the ring. They married and had a daughter, Naina. Sangeeta chose to move with him from posting to posting instead of staying back in Bengaluru. In 2016 they were living inside the army camp at Nagrota. On 29 November 2016, at 5.30 am, Sangeeta woke up to gunshots. She thought it was training. At 5.45 a junior officer told Akshay that terrorists had attacked the artillery regiment. Akshay left with the quick response team. At 8.09 am he texted the family group that he was in the firefight. The women and children were moved to a safer place. At 11.30 Sangeeta called him. His team said he had gone to a different location. At 6.15 pm his commanding officer told her that Akshay had been killed around 8.30 that morning. He was 31. Naina was 3. Seven soldiers died at Nagrota that day. Sangeeta later told Naina that her papa is a star in the sky. She still wears his regimental jacket when she misses him. His family believed he had been recommended for the Shaurya Chakra. On 15 August 2017 his name came on the list under Mention in Dispatches. His mother Meghna asked for a review and said an unsung hero is better than an insulted hero. Sangeeta wrote their whole story on Facebook, and the post went viral. The last thing Akshay had said to her that morning was "You must write about this."

A tribal farmer from Wayanad died this week at 74. In his old mud house, he kept more than 60 traditional rice varieties alive. His name was Cheruvayal Raman. People called him Ramettan. He belonged to the Kurichya tribe in Wayanad, Kerala. When he was 17, his uncle died, and the family's traditional rice seeds came to him. Wayanad once had around 160 native rice varieties. Most of them have disappeared. He grew each old variety in its own small plot. Every year he harvested it, dried the seeds, and stored them in his mud house for the next season. He stopped using chemical fertiliser in 1978. He said the earthworms came back after that. It cost him around Rs 70,000 a year. Some years, his family lived on ration rice. When other farmers came asking, mostly tribal families, he gave them seeds without taking money. In 2023, he got the Padma Shri. Kerala Agricultural University made him a professor of practice. He once said, "Don't call me a hero. Make sure the seeds survive. That is enough."