During our early years in uniform, an illiterate person could join the General Duty category in the Army. We lived through an era when ‘escort’, ‘scout’ and ‘squad’ were pronounced in an identical manner. We had to figure out the right word by relating it to the c
The area where I live in Gurgaon was carved out as a defence sector in 1978 under the patronage of the visionary Chief Minister, the late Bansi Lal. At that time, Gurgaon had a reputation of being simply a gaon. Though in close vicinage of the national capital, it was poorly connected by two single-
THE controversy surrounding the relatively higher revenue expenditure vis-à-vis the capital portion of the defence budget is not new. It keeps surfacing way too often. It got highlighted yet again last month after the Union government announcing the Agnipath scheme. The chief motive behind th
IT was August 1959, our NDA third term. Khadakwasla gets heavy rains in August. It was raining as we went for our morning PT period one day. Physical exercises were being conducted inside the big workshop sheds. Our Havildar Instructor (HI) from the Army Physical Training Corps took us for a road ru