4 min readApr 23, 2026 11:51 AM IST
On the eve of the launch of his next book titled “The Curious and the Classified”, former Army Chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane told The Indian Express that he has put the controversy over his unpublished autobiography squarely behind him. “I have moved on… My target is now to write one book a year, and the books will be in various genres – both fiction and non-fiction.”
While the retired Army Chief did not get into specifics about whether copies of his unpublished title, “The Four Stars of Destiny”, were actually printed or not, he agreed that there was an absence of rules and guidelines for retired military personnel like him submitting their manuscripts for clearance to the Ministry of Defence.
“There is no harm if manuscripts get vetted before publication. The rules for retired military authors can be made, and after all, rules do keep getting revised, don’t they?” he said. Questions about whether the manuscript for his autobiography was given late for vetting, he said, should be put to the publisher, Penguin Random House.
General Naravane was forthright in his views that throughout the controversy, the government had backed him. “Neither me nor my publisher had anything to do with the shenanigans in Parliament. So why should I have been perturbed? I was then, and I am now happily leading a retired life and will be writing more books.” He added that he had decided not to dwell on the past. “I enjoyed writing my memoirs and got the satisfaction out of it. That is all.”
He said his current title is dedicated to all soldiers, sailors and air warriors whose quirks and foibles “make these tales worthy of narration, capturing the customs, traditions and beliefs rooted in shared history that form the indestructible foundation of our armed forces”.
“My current book has anecdotes from all three services. Whether true or false, how they have become part of folklore. Each story is rooted in a real-life incident or military history,” he said.
In his foreword to “The Curious and the Classified,” General Naravane wrote that all stories have their origins in real-life events. “The purpose of each story is to bring to life momentous events or characters, to bridge the gap between the Armed Forces and civilian society, while giving a glimpse into our world (that of the Armed Forces).” He has written that it was an “encounter” with Shashi Tharoor’s book, “A Wonderland of Words”, that inspired him to pen a similar manuscript around the Indian Army.
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There are two dozen stories General Naravane has put out in this collection. “The stories had to have their roots not just in ordinary history but specifically in the military past, culture and tradition, harking back to battles fought long ago whose legacy endures till this day,” he said.
Plus, there is a broad sweep of describing the symbolism, say, of the military salute (and how it is distinct in the Army, Navy and Air Force) to the historic significance of the Missing Man flypasts. As well as separate chapters on the origins of, for instance, the phrase “Chak de phatte” (literally meaning “pick up the planks”) and how it was rooted in Sikh guerrilla warfare. There is another chapter titled “O Captain! My Captain” on the tradition of a captain going down with his sinking ship, wherein Naravane recalls how the Captain of the INS Khukri sacrificed his life after the ship was torpedoed during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war.
