Doon ‘Light’ Infantry

Envy is a mild term. Mild because there are other; more suitable terms (like spiteful, green-eyed) to describe my current feeling towards Army Officers. Ok, let’s face it…I’m plain Jealous.

My friend DK , who commands a rather decorated unit in town, recently got posted, to a beautiful country in the southern hemisphere. His posting meant a farewell party, a band, booze as usual, some dancing and a lot of handshakes and ‘good byes for now’. This is what it meant to most people at the party. But no, not to me, no Sir…this is completely unacceptable. For unlike the current generation, to us passing school in the late 80s and early 90s, the army was not one of the many career options. It was one of the maybe 2, not counting sitting at your father’s shop (that wasn’t a career, it was plain bad luck!). So invariably, about 80% of the class would take the NDA exam, half would reach interviews and a quarter finally become officers. Two of my close friends are senior officers now. I always told my dad that I didn’t like the army. I lied.

The fact was that I was so worried about ‘Grammy Awards’ that I couldn’t even study to save my life. So whilst I have always considered my self ‘General material’, I’m sure even Generals went through a basic math test to get into the army. Well, I couldn’t. So after a couple of attempts at staring at objective type questions, and filling all ‘A’s on the first page and all ‘B’s on the second, I just gave up. Gave up, attempting to crack the NDA exam, not loving the army.

My last 16 years in HR, training and business experience has taught me the following lessons in our current context.
1. You can make all the money in the world, but you can’t live in the cantonment (usually the best part of any town). 2. Your ‘Hugo Boss’ tie cannot make people salute you. 3. Riding a bike on Rajpur Road may be dangerous, but is still not considered an adventure sport. Army gives you a full and free supply of real adventure.
I sometimes wonder why the army has a shortage of officers. Maybe because; they don’t have marketing managers like me. Jealous and green-eyed. By the way, if any of our readers is close to the President of India, may I request a favour? I’d like to raise a unit of officers who couldn’t crack the math exam, but love the army. We’ll call it the Doon ‘Light’ (in math) Infantry; or any other name the President likes. Anyone?

Vineet Panchhi owns and runs Audio Wagon, his lifelong passion and now a music company. He blogs at Unplanned Journeys , and can be reached at: vineet.panchhi@audiowagon.com