His father served 28 years in the Indian Army. Gaurav Shukla (36), never made it past the selection process himself. 

A decade later, he has built an organisation that quietly reaches what the system does not — non-pensioner veterans over the age of 60, war widows without income, soldiers living in unfortunate conditions within their own local communities in the remote parts of India.

In 2017, a photograph of an elderly man near Connaught Place in Delhi went viral on social media. The man — later identified as Peethambaran — was hunched on a footpath, one arm resting on a crutch, an iron rod inserted in his hip joint after a rooftop accident months earlier. 

Cricketer Gautam Gambhir had shared the image, and the comments section quickly filled with assumptions: that the man was a drunk, a burden, someone who had brought this upon himself.

What the commenters did not know about Peethambaran is that he served the Indian Army as a Signalman in the Signal Corps during the 1965 and 1971 wars. He decided to leave his uniform behind to return to Keralam and take care of his terminally ill mother. Following this break, he had fallen short of the 15-year service threshold that was needed to qualify for a pension. 

“After my mother's death, my family was scattered, and I had no reason to stay. I came to Delhi and spent the next four decades surviving on whatever work I could find while I was young. The situation got worse after the building accident in 2017,” he told The Better India.

Peethambaran had even made three attempts to end his life owing to loneliness, depression and financial instability.

Gaurav Shukla, 26 at the time, saw that photograph and decided to go find him.

A soldier's son who never got to serve

Gaurav grew up in a household shaped by military life. His father wore the army's uniform for 28 years and served during the 1999 Kargil War. Gaurav tried multiple times to join the armed forces himself and did not make it. The loss stayed with him. 

“The uniform, to me, represented something not just duty, but a kind of pride I had grown up watching from close range and had never quite been able to claim,” says Gaurav.

He built a different career instead, completing a master's in TV production, broadcast, and journalism, then moving to Mumbai, working in film casting, eventually handling auditions for television serials. He was good at it. He also had, somewhere in the background, a different kind of restlessness.

The Jantar Mantar turning point

In 2015, he visited Jantar Mantar during the One Rank One Pension movement and found what he later described as a "mini Bharat" — veterans from Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, the Northeast, gathered in a protest that national television was handling with selective accuracy. 

His father watched the news at home and was told that pension arrears had been distributed. The men at the protest site described a different reality. The gap between what was being reported and what was actually true became, for Gaurav, a threshold he could not step back from.

First cases, first name

He made a video about three soldiers from a Haryana village who had collectively fought in the wars of 1962, 1965, and 1971. A colonel's wife shared it on social media. Upon seeing the video, a Businessman from Jaipur reached out and offered to give Rs 5,000 to Sepoy Banarasi (one of the 3 soldiers whose story was shot) as a token of appreciation and gratitude.

“Alongside that, I also came to know of and reached my first real case — a martyr's family in Faizabad — when I cold-called the Sarpanchs of several villages in North India, trying to find out if there were families of any ex-soldiers living in distress who needed support,” Gaurav says.

For the Faizabad soldier's family, the team was able to travel to Faizabad to meet them, and persuaded the school to waive the tuition fee for the children through the twelfth grade. 

“Soon, one family led to another and the cycle began,” he recalls.

He named the organisation Support Our Heroes (SOH), which was established around February 2017. Its stated purpose was simple: to connect a need with someone who has the resources to meet it.

The Ex-soldier sleeping at Connaught Place

In 2019, when Gaurav came across the photograph of Peethambaran, he spent close to a week trying to locate him. He printed an A3-sized copy of the image and walked the Connaught Place area systematically, showing it to shopkeepers, guards, and vendors. A security guard outside a jewellery store eventually pointed him in the right direction.

Garav recalls that when he visited his home, what he found was a structure made of sheets, plastic, and rope — the kind that people in........

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