With Children’s Day, 14th November, falling on a Saturday this year, the nation’s children will be cheated out of a fun holiday. However, a workaround is quite likely in the works, given that schoolteachers look forward to this day with as much excitement as their wards – it’s the day they get to be goofy on stage for the children’s benefit.
How much the children squealing in delight at their teachers’ antics will know about the man whose birthday they are commemorating, Chacha Nehru, is moot. But one of the delightful stories that explains just why our first Prime Minister was so beloved of children traces roots to his first post-independence visit to Bangalore and Mysore, in December 1948. Earlier the same year, on September 13, the first Home Minister of independent India, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, launched Operation Polo, a military intervention to liberate and integrate Hyderabad, one of the last princely states to hold out against the Indian Union. It was swift and effective; the Nizam’s forces surrendered on September 18.
In between all this frenetic activity, Nehru attended the first post-independence Mysore khedda – the traditional wild elephant-capturing operation – which the Maharaja had organized in the Prime Minister’s honour at the Kakanakote forests along the Kabini river. The two Indian elephants that had been star attractions at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo had been ordered killed by the Japanese government during WWII, for fear of what would happen should they break free during an air raid. Nehru then proceeded to Jakkur, to inaugurate the new Government Flying Training School (GFTS), set up on 200 acres of land gifted to Mysore state by the aviation-loving last Maharaja of Mysore, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (JCW), on the condition that it only be used to set up a training school. No less than 35 wild elephants were captured during this operation ( khedda was finally outlawed in 1972, under the landmark Wildlife Protection Act championed by the then-PM, Indira Gandhi). In June 1949, Nehru opened his official mailbag to discover that it was stuffed with letters from children in Japan, requesting him to send them an elephant!
And now, the children said, there were only “pigs and birds” to look at “which give us no interest.”
