Long-long ago when I was a newly promoted Barsati Captain, posted in the golden sands of ‘Ja-sale-mer’. Our company along with our BMP-Is and BRDMs was deployed for annual training in area of ‘Khiyan-Danwar’. We youngsters had no other work but to recce our operational area inch by inch, dune by dune till we became masters. Believe you me, we could go blindfolded and tell you where we had reached when our vehicles turned or went over a bump on those desert tracks. We learnt map reading on a map which had no landmarks. BOPs (Border Out Posts) were manned by a ‘camel battalion’ were the only reference points. Tracks were few and far between. All movement was mostly cross country. The border fence had not been conceived by then. Boundary pillars were often missed. We would cut across to the Paki side between pillars routinely. The only thing one understood was that we were supposed to fire our missiles onto the oncoming enemy tanks/mechanised force...
I had the proud privilege to attend the “Defence Services Staff College” in Wellington, Nilgiris in TN, way back in 1999-2000. I am not sure how I got nominated but this much was sure that I had worked very hard to get in. On arrival, ‘C’ Division was allotted to me. It was almost like an isolated island, down in the dungeons nicknamed ‘Sri Lanka’. To reach the famous tea room which used to have our lockers, where we were fed less snacks and more whites & was like climbing Mt Everest. In the division we were further divided into syndicates. Suffice to say, my fellow ‘owls’ were way better read and erudite than me. As luck would have it, my first DS or Directing Staff/instructor turned out to be Col GD Bakshi, VSM. My respect and reverence for him will always be there. He retired as a Major General having served in all sorts of terrains, commanded all sorts of troops with first hand experience of the war in 1971 and a counter insurgency spe...