Chief of Army Staff Gen J J Singh with his wife visited the family of late Colonel Vasanth Venugopal in Bangalore on Saturday.
Col Vasanth laid his life fighting insurgency at the Uri sector in Jammu and Kashmir on July 30.
Ms Singh, dressed in white salwar kameez, arrived at their house in Sadashivnagar at around 10.15 am and was later joined by General Singh around 10.40 am. The couple spent almost an hour with the late Colonel’s wife Subhashini, her two daughters Rukmini (10) and Yeshodha, her parents and parents-in-law.
Good gesture
“They assured us of all support. It was great gesture on the part of the Army chief to have visited us,” said Mr N K Venugopal, father of the late officer. “We have lost our son. We don’t want anything but w e are very grateful to Gen Singh to have visited us. I feel happy that the Army recognises my son’s contribution to the country. He was a great soldier; he wanted to be in the Army from the age of three. I told him to look for other options but he was very clear about his profession. My son was a very ferocious soldier but a soft boy,”  he said. Col Vasanth had served the Army for 18 years before being martyred. He will be decorated with the Ashoka Chakra, posthumous, on the Republic Day next year.
Script
Just four days before his death, he and his wife had finished the script of a play, ‘The Silent Front — A tribute to a Soldier’s Wife’. “It was his dream to finish the script. For the last 10 years he had been pursuing it. He wanted me to do the lead role because of my dance and cultural background. The play is about the strong support a soldier gets from his wife. It’s a celebration of the strength of a woman. I’m playing the lead role in it,” said Subhashini.
NSD team
The play, directed by Seema Azmi of National School of Drama, will be staged at Kamini Auditorium, New Delhi on September 8 this year.
“A lot of people from the NSD are involved in it,” she added.