As I prepared to leave out of USA, I started wrapping up things. This included preparing a work report of things done, preparing a schedule for things do be done over next 3 months, and so on.
While I was handing it over I realized that my business contact in USA was US Marine at the time of first Gulf War in 1991 (launched by then US President George Bush.) He narrated a number of interesting experiences. This included his staying on board the war ship where they used to get so much less space to sleep that they could barely turn on their sides. He also narrated his early morning running exercises on the ship saying "When we used to exercise the ship would be sailing on the waves. Thus our run used to be always at an inclined plane; either running up-hill or down-hill. Those were tough days. I had to take the decision to join the army as I was running short of money for education at that time. The days were tough. We had rigorous physical training."
It was natural to talk about war movies. I think Bollywood does not make a whole lop of war movies. Those days, there were hardly any good war movies being made. So for us then the only war movies to see were made by Hollywood. Impressions of movies like Guns of Neverone, Where Eagles Dare, Five for Hell, Platoon, are still fresh in my mind.
"What you see in Hollywood movies is hardly the complete truth. The director shows that part of the soldier's life that he feels is interesting. Rarely does a movie throw light on the complete life of a soldier", he said. "My father had fought in Vietnam and he said the movie Platoon was far from reality. Serials like Band of Brotherhood probably have gone closer to life of soldiers."
This was news for me! It was difficult to accept that what a war movie like Platoon showed was not complete truth.
I recollected what I was doing when he was actively involved in Gulf War-I. We were in our third year of engineering. My room partner's father was in Kuwait then and he was worried about the war breaking out. He would therefore be religiously be listening to radio channels like Voice of America and BBC on Short-wave Radio (these were days before Internet and Mobile Phone came to India). The radio reception used to be good late in the night. So we would be glued to the radio till late night trying to find out if the war would start any soon. Every night we would be a disappointed as the war would not start.
We wanted to be the "ones to break the news before anyone else." We actually did that, and we beat the BBC, CNN, and Voice of America at that. The only problem was the news was not real! We had "engineered a radio recording" saying that war had broken out when "USA fired the first missile on Iraq from its warship USS Gabriel." It was recorded in my room partner's voice who could fake American ascent. To make it "sound real" we even had introduced background noise. We had written down the script before the actual recording. The name USS Gabriel was inspired by the tennis player "Gabriela Sabatini" whose poster was pasted in our room. We made sure that the recording started abruptly. So we recorded it on one of my room partner's favourite cassette erasing his favourite song. It helped us to sell the story saying "do you think we would spoil his cassette for nothing?"
It worked! We did manage to get attention of our entire hostel next day. The news even spread the college through all our hostel-mates. People believed it for one-day. We even told them "Indian media is sure to suppress this news for at least 2 days because it is Government-controlled (there was no cable TV and no private news channels then.)
I hardly knew that I would, at some point of time, do sound recording editing and multimedia authoring for earning my bread and butter.
As you can imagine, I do not have any copy of this "ingenious piece of work" we produced using only a cassette recorder, audio cassette, cassette cover and a key (used to generate the cyclical noise.)
Here is the fun part: while I was engineering this news items of the war in Pune; my business contact in was actually fighting it in Iraq! We both lived to share each other's stories after almost 20 years! What a coincidence! ..and a paradox!
A paradox is necessarily a coincidence I guess!
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