Tum Rakshak Kahu Ko Darna: The Forty Verses A Pilot Was Reciting When His Aircraft Fell

Captain Smit Machchhar was in a hospital bed, on the phone with the Indian Prime Minister, and somewhere in the middle of it he broke down. "Sorry, main aapke saamne ro raha hoon sir." Narendra Modi told him that if he could not cry in front of him, then where. 

The flydubai aircraft Machchhar was commanding from Dubai to Tel Aviv fell close to 14,000 feet in under thirty seconds. His first officer, an Omani national, had stabbed him in the cockpit, and an unlawful interference code went out that scrambled Israeli fighter jets. There were 174 people on board. The aircraft landed at Tabuk in north-western Saudi Arabia. The first officer was arrested. Benjamin Netanyahu said Machchhar had prevented a catastrophic midair disaster. Modi said his valour had saved hundreds of lives.

In the conversation, Machchhar describes it without any of that vocabulary. He had fallen. He was wounded, he was pinned beneath something, he was still being struck. And he says he could feel, the way a man feels a house he has lived in for years, that the aircraft was going down. Seventeen years flying, eleven of them as a captain, and he says he knows with his eyes shut what an aircraft is doing. So he worked out that there was one thing left that he could still reach.

In his conversation with the braveheart Captain Smit Machchhar, PM @narendramodi lauds his courage and composure. pic.twitter.com/w5uHSl3sAe

— Randhir Jaiswal (@MEAIndia) October 2, 2026

"Bas wo khol diya sir." I just opened it.

Then he says the sentence around which this entire account should be read. Whenever the pain comes, he told the Prime Minister, only one thing comes to him, and he recites the Hanuman Chalisa. He was reciting it then too, on the floor of the cockpit, in the dark, with the ground coming up.

The Hanuman Chalisa is forty verses and three couplets, composed by Tulsidas in the sixteenth century, and the first thing to notice about it is the language. He did not write it in Sanskrit. He wrote it in Awadhi, the speech of the villages of what is now eastern Uttar Pradesh, which is to say he wrote it so that people who would never read a scripture could carry one. That decision is the whole point. The Chalisa is built to be memorised by children before they understand it so that it is already inside them on the day comprehension would be too slow. It is not stored on a shelf. It is stored in the hearts of the Indian people.

PM @narendramodi spoke with Captain Smit Machchhar and enquired about his wellbeing.

PM expressed that his courage has made 1.4 billion Indians proud and that the entire country stands with him. He conveyed his best wishes for Captain Smit’s speedy recovery. https://t.co/C2ketZOGGF

— Randhir Jaiswal (@MEAIndia) October 2, 2026

What is actually in it is not a plea for rescue. It is a portrait of a character and the character is a subordinate. Hanuman in these forty verses is never the hero of his own story. He is Ram's envoy, Ram's doorkeeper, the one who brings the mountain and the medicine and carries the message, and the text praises him precisely for the thing that the modern world has stopped counting as greatness: he is magnificent in someone else's service. Tulsidas opens not by asking for victory but by calling himself budhhi-heen, without intellect, and asking for bal, buddhi, vidya — strength, discernment, knowledge, in that order, with the removal of affliction coming last. The order is the instruction. Competence does not begin with confidence. It begins with an honest account of what you do not have.

There are two verses in the middle that between them contain most of the practical teaching. Sukshma roop dhari Siyahi dikhava, bikat roop dhari Lank jarava. He took a minute form to appear before Sita; he took a terrifying form to burn Lanka. Same being, two sizes, chosen entirely by what the moment required — gentle where gentleness was needed, frightening where it was not. We tend to think of character as consistency. The Chalisa thinks of it as range. A man who can only be fierce is not strong, he is merely loud, and a man who can only be mild is not kind, he is only unprepared. The judgement being praised here is the judgement of knowing which form the situation is asking for, and Machchhar made that judgement on a cockpit floor in a fraction of a second: not fight back, not get up, but reach the one thing that would let 174 other people in.

PM @narendramodi spoke with Captain Smit Machchhar and enquired about his wellbeing.

PM expressed that his courage has made 1.4 billion Indians proud and that the entire country stands with him. He conveyed his best wishes for Captain Smit’s speedy recovery. https://t.co/C2ketZOGGF

— Randhir Jaiswal (@MEAIndia) October 2, 2026

And then, Durgam kaaj jagat ke jete, sugam anugrah tumhre tete. However impassable the task in this world, it becomes easy by your grace. Read carelessly, this sounds like magic, and it is not. Nothing in the verse says the task gets smaller. It says the difficulty changes location — it moves out of you. What collapses is not the obstacle but the paralysis in front of it, and anybody who has frozen before something hard knows that the obstacle was never the real problem. The companion verse makes the same claim about the body: Nase rog harai sab peera, japat nirantar Hanumat beera. Disease destroyed, all pain removed, by continuous repetition. This is not a claim about medicine. It is a claim about attention, which is the only thing a person in pain still controls. Machchhar is using it exactly as written. He does not say the Chalisa stops the pain. He says that when the pain comes, this is what comes with it.

Which brings us to the line that gives this piece its title and it is the most misread line in the text. Sab sukh lahai tumhari sarna, tum rachchhak kahu ko dar na. All comfort is found in your refuge; you are the protector, so why fear anyone. The misreading is to hear refuge as shelter — as a promise that the devoted will be kept out of harm. The Chalisa promises nothing of the kind and Hanuman's own story is the refutation. He is forever being sent across oceans and into burning cities. Refuge here does not mean the danger is removed. It means the fear is, and those are different operations. Fearlessness in this tradition is never the absence of terror. It is having something you are more unwilling to lose than your own life so that the arithmetic simply stops being about you. For a few seconds on Wednesday, that was 174 strangers.

An unforgettable conversation with Captain Smit, filled with pride and emotions. pic.twitter.com/CCf46PKOWR

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) October 2, 2026

He told the Prime Minister that every morning, when he does his puja, his two-year-old son sits in his lap and he recites the Chalisa aloud to him. We are far from the country, he said, but we should not be far from our culture.

Start your day with "Hanuman Chalisa." pic.twitter.com/yVLDgfgtue

— Ayodhya Darshan (@ShriAyodhya_) September 8, 2026

That is how forty verses travel, through a child on a lap in a flat in another country, learning sounds he does not yet understand, so that thirty years from now, if a bad day ever comes for him, he will not have to look for the words. Modi ended the call in Gujarati. Before he did, he said one more thing, and it was the right thing to say on 2 October. What ahimsa actually is, he told the wounded man, you have shown by living it.