Bengaluru: Major Akshay Girish Kumar (31) was one of seven martyrs who lost their lives battling terrorists in Nagrota on Tuesday. The soldier was part of The Bengal Sappers regiment and was posted with the 51 Engineers.
He was a simple man who enjoyed playing pranks and long drives, according to his friends. His father retired as a Wing Commander from the Indian Air Force while his 85-year-old grandfather retired as a Colonel from the army.
Friends remember Akshay as someone who was very determined to join the armed forces. “He always knew that he would end up in the army. He would tell us that he had just joined college as a stopgap arrangement till he got selected,” said Amulya Kashyap, a friend who studied with Akshay in Jain College where he was enrolled in a BSc. (PME) course in 2003.
With a larger than life personality, Major Kumar was the life of the class. “When we first saw him, all my friends told me how handsome he was. We were part of a small group and we loved spending time with him as he was always up to some prank. He would throw pencils, papers or crack jokes. We called him the class entertainer. We even bunked classes together,” Ms. Kashyap added.
At the same time, he was very good at studies.
“He managed to balance his activities in the National Cadet Corps (NCC) with his studies and loved working in the lab. He never lost focus and always told us right from the beginning that he would leave before the course ended, as he would get selected for the army. True to his words, he left after a year-and-a-half after being selected for the National Defence Academy (NDA),” said Professor Asha Rajiv, Director, School of Graduate Studies, Jain University, who was his teacher at the time.
Major Kumar joined the NDA in 2004. During his career, he was posted in Kolkata and Pune before being posted to Jammu and Kashmir. He married his school friend Sangeetha Ravindran five years ago and she was staying with him in J&K with their daughter.
Always stayed in touch
After leaving the city to pursue his career in the army, Major Kumar stayed in touch with his friends and teachers. “He would meet us whenever he was in town. He said that he missed college life and compared it with his training regimen in the army,” Professor Rajiv added.
He was always available for his friends. “He would narrate tales about his cross-country races and navigation classes. Although it sometimes seemed that he was showing off, he was supremely confident of his abilities and his training. He took pride in his training,” Ms. Kashyap said.
His child was the best thing in his life
The birth of Naina was the happiest moment of his life, friends said. His mother Meghna Girish posted on Facebook that she hopes Naina would be inspired by Tajamul Islam, the eight-year-old Kashmiri kickboxer.
