Hindus in the Sky
When the Prime Minister asked how he had managed it, Smit did not talk about training. He said he had been reciting the Hanuman Chalisa.
A year earlier, Sunita Williams had carried a small Ganesha to the International Space Station, and on an earlier flight a copy of the Gita. She went up for eight days and stayed 286. Her crisis was endless waiting; his was sudden violence. Yet both came to the same place: past the last page of any manual, where only what was planted deepest remains. She reached for the god of thresholds. He reached for the hymn to Hanuman, the servant who forgets his own strength until others need it.
Neither performed for an audience. Their faith was not blared through loudspeakers or announced at rallies, and it was not worn as a badge. It was deeply personal: a whisper in a capsule above the Earth, a silent recitation on a blood-streaked cockpit floor. These were prayers meant for one listener. We happened to overhear them.
When astronauts read Genesis from lunar orbit, we call it poetry. When a footballer crosses himself before a penalty, we call it nerves. When Barack Obama emptied his pockets and showed a tiny Hanuman among his lucky charms, the world found it charming. When an Indian pilot whispers to the same god while bleeding, it becomes a position.
That is the double standard. Faith under pressure is usually treated as the oldest human reflex. When the faith is Hindu, one side hears signalling and the other turns it into a slogan. One scoffs and the other enlists it, and neither leaves it alone.
Within a day, the comments under his photograph had turned a hymn of service into a weapon. Whole faiths were indicted, whole nationalities barred from cockpits, a prayer conscripted into a war it never declared. Hanuman crossed the ocean to rescue, not to retaliate.
Spare a thought, too, for the disappointed. Somewhere, a celebration was cancelled on Wednesday: the one that would have followed a plane full of Israelis falling into the desert. Captain Smit Machchhar, bleeding on a cockpit floor, ruined it. Within 67 minutes, the disappointed were insisting it had never
happened.In Pakistan, some went further still: having peddled a "false narrative" that drew a public rebuke from an Israeli envoy, they excused the attack as Gaza's natural fury, as though grief for one tragedy could license the murder of 174 strangers, while the horror of October 7 stirred no such outrage.
What has been just as telling is how hard some found it to say the simple thing: a wounded pilot found strength in the words his mother taught him, and used it to save 174 lives. Withholding that small compliment, for fear of what it might concede, has never looked smaller.
The sceptics owe these two the same courtesy they give every other believer under strain. The admirers owe them restraint. A prayer that helped open a door does not need our management. It is strongest left as it was: quiet, personal, and enough.
Smit still recites that hymn every day with his two-year-old son. On that Wednesday it went with him, in a whisper, into the worst minutes of his life. Of everything said this week, by those who mocked it and those who marched with it, only one fact matters: it helped him open the door.
His name, from the Sanskrit *smita*, means a smile. On Wednesday he gave 174 families a reason for one.
Let the rest of it be his.
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