Manoj Kumar Yadav, a Deputy Commandant with the CRPF, took the hot seat on the 18th season of the television quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati this week and impressed viewers with his calm reasoning. Originally from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh, he currently serves at the CRPF Intelligence School in Gurugram, Haryana. The episode drew attention not just for how far he progressed in the game, but for the glimpses it offered into the risks that come with his job.
The road to 50 lakh rupees
Yadav used every one of his lifelines while working through the game, getting 14 questions right in a row and banking a substantial 50 lakh rupees. Along the way he opened up to host Amitabh Bachchan about several personal details and recounted a few hair-raising incidents from his years on duty.
A one crore rupee question he chose not to gamble on
Once the 50 lakh rupees was secured, Bachchan put the 15th question to him, worth 1 crore rupees. It asked which explorer and candidate for the American presidency is credited with naming the strait that the famous Golden Gate Bridge later took its name from. The four options offered were James Blaine, John Fremont, Winfield Scott and Leland Stanford. The question demanded precise historical knowledge rather than general awareness, and unsure of the correct answer, Yadav decided against the risk and made the sensible call to walk away from the game with the 50 lakh rupees he had already won.
His guess after quitting turned out wrong too
After exiting the game, Bachchan asked him to take a guess anyway, and Yadav named Winfield Scott, but that answer wasn't correct. The right answer was John Fremont. John C. Fremont had been a candidate in the 1856 American presidential election, and it was he who named the San Francisco strait Golden Gate back in 1846, because the spot reminded him of the Golden Horn harbour in Istanbul. Decades later, in 1937, the landmark Golden Gate Bridge was completed at that very location.
Survival training that sometimes means eating snakes
During the conversation, Bachchan also asked about the survival training given inside the COBRA battalion. Yadav explained that soldiers go through extremely tough training to survive harsh conditions deep in the jungle. He said that in especially difficult situations, troops sometimes have no choice but to eat snakes to keep themselves going. This, he noted, is a deliberate part of the training, meant to prepare soldiers to hold their ground on the battlefield even without any regular access to food or water.
An encounter in Jharkhand's forests left a bullet splinter in his eye
Yadav also shared the story of a dangerous encounter in the jungles of Jharkhand. He said his team had travelled to the hideout in ordinary civilian vehicles to stay hidden from the enemy. The moment they called on the men to surrender, heavy firing broke out from the other side. During that exchange, a splinter from a bullet lodged itself in the retina of his right eye. The injury underscored just how close he had come to losing his eyesight altogether while carrying out the operation. Yadav said that suffering an injury like that in the service of the country is nothing but a matter of pride for him.
