By Jaideep Sarin

Calamities, war and tragedies bring a nation together. And sometimes so does the fate of a little boy trapped inside a deep well - as in India recently when barriers of class, caste and religion melted away and the entire nation virtually stopped for two days to stay glued to TV screens as if willing young Prince hang in there a little longer.

The Indian Army and the many volunteers at the spot used all their technical finesse to rescue the five-year-old boy, who had fallen into a precipitous 60 ft deep and 1.5 ft wide shaft while playing one Friday evening in the village of Haldaheri near the Hindu pilgrim centre of Kurukshetra in northern India, about 160 km from New Delhi. For the next 48 hours and more, as TV channels got alerted to the story and beamed live pictures through the day, the nation got galvanised as seldom before.

Prayers were held all over in temples, mosques, churches and home. If in West Bengal, some people held yagnas, or fire liturgy, special prayers were conducted in Sikhism's most famous gurdwara, the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, Punjab. In the Sufi shrine at Ajmer Sharif, devotees placed a special 'chadar' offering as they prayed for the child of an ordinary farm worker.

Elsewhere, people were seen crying and praying silently in their homes for the child who could well have been their own. The flow of SMS mails of get well wishes was also unending.

Even Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was moved and sent his blessings to the family.

The drama was brought alive as a closed circuit TV (CCTV) camera had been lowered into the well by a man who, moved by the plight of the boy and eager to help, drove distances so everybody could watch Prince huddled in the dark, munching the biscuits and sipping water lowered down to him,.

Finally, after almost 50 hours on a Sunday evening, the dramatic rescue operation ended and Prince - miraculously unscathed - was brought out by an Indian Army officer to the cheers of a large crowd and the collective relief of the entire nation.

In a coincidence so amazing that it could have been scripted for a film, it also happened to be Prince's fifth birthday that Sunday.

As the boy wrapped in a cotton shawl was lifted by an army officer from near the site of the accident, the nation that had for so long watched with anticipation and trepidation cheered lustily at the collaborative effort made by the army, the district administration and local residents.

It had been a meticulously mounted rescue.

A 56 ft deep, 15 ft wide parallel pit was dug and a soldier lowered into the shaft in a metallic cylinder held by a crane. He reached the boy within seconds and found him in a daze but otherwise miraculously unhurt.

The boy's parents - Rama Chander and Karamjit - were speechless. It took them several minutes before they could hold their son. "It is a rebirth for him. We cannot express our gratitude to all those who helped and prayed for him," said the overjoyed father.

People, who had thronged the area in large numbers, broke into an impromptu jig and hugged each other in joy as the frail boy was sighted.

"He is a brave boy and fought for his survival despite his fall and the subsequent ordeal," said local MP Naveen Jindal as the Haryana state chief minister announced a grant of Rs.200,000 ($4,200) to the family.

"It's a miracle that the boy did not have any major injury despite falling nearly 55 ft. He also survived the 50-hour ordeal in the dark pit deep inside the earth. His survival instinct saved him," said one of the doctors attending on the boy after he was brought out.

Behind the difficult rescue mission were the Indian Army's 66 Engineers regiment, of course, and many other valiant men who volunteered to risk their lives to save the boy.

Most of these unsung heroes did not move from the spot during the over 30 hours of the rescue mission, braving the rain, heat and all other odds to make sure that Prince was fine.

Even as the trapped boy himself defied death - first by surviving the fall and then spending nearly all those hours in the narrow pit - it was the CCTV camera lowered into the pit by Amarjit Singh of a nearby village that actually proved to be the most crucial link between Prince and the outside world.

Amarjit sat on his chair for the entire 30 hours, holding the electric wire with the CCTV camera lowered into the well. It was the camera pictures that gave the rescue team from the Engineers regiment and the local labour force the impetus to try a very difficult rescue mission.

What goes to Amarjit's credit is that he reached the village on his own and was not called by anyone to help. "I knew how to operate CCTV cameras and thought that this could help in the rescue attempt," Singh told IANS.

It was this camera that beamed the well-being of Prince to the world.

Amarjit's friend Jagjit Singh and his uncle Baldev Singh were another set of volunteers. They arrived at the scene with oxygen cylinders and compressors on their own. Had it not been for the oxygen supplied to the boy inside the pit, he could have died due to suffocation from the gases under the earth.

Then there was Delhi-based businessman Surinder Kumar who found his way to the village on Saturday after seeing pictures of the trapped boy on TV. He assisted the village labour force and others engaged in the manual digging of a parallel tunnel to reach the boy.

A team of over a dozen village labourers led by Jaswinder Singh were the ones who did all the hard work - even digging the soil with bare fingers at times as using machines would have led the earth to cave in on the boy.

There were also army and civilian crane operators who did not leave their seats for even a minute during the entire operation.

Finally, it was assistant sub-inspector Amarnath of the Haryana Police who reached out to the trapped boy inside the pit through the parallel tunnel and pulled him out.

And there ended the saga of Prince, the son of a farm labourer who turned out to be a Prince in so much more than name. The one who is neither a celebrity nor a star child and yet managed to stop a country - fretting with so many worries - right in its tracks as it put its collective will behind him.