I was seven when India was involved in a war with China. That was 1962. Even as a child there was no way one could have stayed aloof for there was so much going on. I do not recall what the conversations regarding the politics were, but there was much to be done around the house and in everyday life.

The most vivid memory I have from then was of the blackouts. We had to paper over all our windows so no light leaked out at night, supposedly making us invisible to a potential bomber. Those were the days of the typewriter and carbon paper was used liberally to cover up all the panes. A faint memory suggests we might have also tried other ways of blackening the windows.

Thinking of that effort now, one cannot but notice how far we have come technologically, that any amount of darkening of windows will not spare us from an attacker today. On the other hand, I wonder if the Chinese planes could have come that far inland, all the way to Bhopal – but we were taking no chances. The BHEL plant was supposedly a potential target.

A quiet descended every evening as if it wasn’t just the lights that we needed to worry about. We must have taken care not to speak loudly – the volume on the radio turned down as the grown up women in the house knitted sweaters and warm clothes for the soldiers on the front. The women from the North, the Panjabi women we called them – boy they knew how to knit and how much they did then.

The nation asked for donations, and poured in they did, I recall – clothes, foodstuff, chocolates and dry fruits for the cold weather. Women donated their jewelry and there were blood drives.

But then there were the shortages we had to face in our own lives. Food and many other essential items were rationed. One went long distances to stand in queues for sugar and kerosene. I think I knew how to ride a bicycle, for it would have been difficult to carry rations for such long distances otherwise.

I don’t believe we had cooking gas then, so it was Primus stoves that kept the kitchen fires going – two of them, one with a silencer that burned with a blue flame and the other without – the angry loud one. Without kerosene we would have gone hungry.

Any way, I thought these are the memories of that war etched in my being, when today it felt as if, that while the war did end without lasting too long, it did not seem like we had won. In fact, whether because of what we experienced, there was, at least for me, a sense of loss.It is as if I have PTSD.

For all the later declarations of Chinese-Indian brotherhood, (Pandit Nehru had coined a slogan – Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai), there was for me, a sense of betrayal and an enduring loss of trust of the Chinese. I think that feeling of distrust has remained till today. I have over the years rationalized it as something that only has to do with state policy, but I cannot deny that that lurking sense of mistrust remains.

So, we come to the present moment, almost 60 years later, with the recent incident in Ladakh. I cannot ignore the Chinese geo-political expansionist ambitions that have been so visible for decades, that I used to think, in fact I still do, that Americans were naive in their opening up to that nation during the Reagan era. I told you that mistrust remains.

I knew in my heart that the camel would invariable take over the bedouin’s tent, and it most certainly has.

But we the ordinary citizens of the world have colluded too, through our desire for the bargain and cheap goods, and perhaps also through our retirement funds. I feel guilty now for having an iPhone and other Apple products and most certainly a host of other products that were made in China.

We have come far. We no longer have to darken our windows anymore during a confrontation, but we have long done that much more pervasively – so oblivious have we been to the dragon that never stopped breathing fire.