'Basu captures the human face of the Kargil war, treating the war wounded including a Pakistani soldier. Touching, easy to read, an interesting perspective.' -- Lt General (Retd) Vinod Bhatia (Former Director General of Military Operations, Indian Army)

'A singular, valuable and admirable account of pracitising medicine during a time of war by the surgeon at the field hospital in Kargil. It was his first posting and he was thrown into the deep end of things. The Kargil War Surgeon's Testimony makes for rivetting reading.' -- Nitin Gokhale, author of Beyond NJ 9842: The Siachen Saga and R.N. Kao: The Gentleman Spymaster

As the first military surgeon on call at Kargil in the summer of 1999-when Pakistani troops, disguised as goatherds, crossed over the Line of Control and besieged critical Indian peaks-Lt. Col. (Dr.) Arup Ratan Basu toiled to rescue nearly 350 of our valiant soldiers from the jaws of death. One can only imagine how helpless he, trained to be a lifesaver, must have felt seeing a steadfast stream of young men marching to their deaths at those inhospitable heights-that too in a war not of their nation's making.

In Basu's view, it's not so much about the futility of war as its untold human cost, which gets muffled beneath the nationalist pomp and clamour of any war effort-even one like Kargil, undertaken in self-defence. Yet for the parents who lose their sons, wives their husbands, and children their fathers, this is the only real consequence of war. And perhaps on no one's conscience do these deaths weigh more heavily than on a doctor's-who, for no fault of his own, could not prevent them.

A military doctor with a poet's sensitivity and talent for lyrical expression, Arup Ratan Basu has composed a haunting elegy to the lives lost and blood spilt at Kargil. And as a powerful, poignant, and heart-wrenching indictment of the debilitating cost of war, The Kargil War Surgeon's Testimony ought to be read-and remembered.

-- SHASHI THAROOR