Im a Soldier can I work from home
yes
it’s interesting to tell you guys that
my first stock in my rasta was
right at the same platform two years
back and again i am here that’s the
circle of life
out of survival for an army man if you
really ask what
art of survival is
i think from day one when you end up in
the academy
you are given tasks which
kind of teaches you art of survival
and it somewhere teaches you how not to
crave in life okay and
i’ve been listening to all these
speakers and i realized that
we have gratitude as one of the most
important aspects of life and
we feel gratitude if we possess
gratitude
towards god and things that we have in
life everything will be
really really fine having said that
is art of survival a choice that is
given to
a defense guide
no we are designed
to survive because if we don’t survive
if i get wounded in war
there are more people who will be
involved to take me back
there are more people who will be
involved
to fight my battle and the bigger
picture is
that you will not be successful in your
mission
so when i say this that we are designed
to succeed i mean
that not everybody on this earth on this
planet in this auditorium
has the luxury of deciding how he wants
to survive
this nine months of
period and we are still struggling with
corona
when we all were struggling
to not contain ourselves in our own
comfortable zone
of self-created luxury in our own houses
imagine there were battalions there were
regiments
which were inducted in galvan
when we were taught social distancing
social distinctioning was the last thing
that the soldier
who was getting inducted on his mind
because he could see a bigger enemy
right in front of him so you know when
we go to the academy there are some
very interesting things that people
don’t so what do
they teach you how to not sweat small
and what is not sweating small
you have junior term you have senior
terms when you are the junior
very often it will happen in initial
days it definitely happens the seniors
will come and they’ll eat away your
cookies
they will deliberately delay you for
your breakfast
and then suddenly some officer will come
and he’ll ask if everything is all right
with you
so we all go from civil background where
like
in this corona time we have a lot of
critical life is
not growing and they start crippling it
so the seniors had our cookies or we
were
this morning delayed because the seniors
held us somewhere in the second stand
and we could not
reach the mess in time
the next scene is the seniors
roger engineers and
they screw you so hard that
next time when the officer comes and he
asks you
all okay
he says
in last fiscal year or financial year
and stuff like that life has much more
to it
i wish a soldier has the liberty to work
from home
can you imagine we all have
work from home scenario and there are
organizations who also pay you
to buy your chair and laptop and that
whole office setup
can you think of a soldier working from
home can he do that
can he set up a call and
virtually report all okay
no that doesn’t happen
so when i talk of gratitude my gratitude
is not towards god
when i talk of gratitude my gratitude is
towards the fact that every morning when
we get up
we have a free india where we breathe
foreign
because you are free
this freedom has not come free
let’s understand that there are many
people
who’ve been involved to secure this
freedom
for all of us for over last seven
decades
when i talk of gratitude i expect
every free indian to bear them in your
thoughts
i don’t expect you to take out money
from your salary and start
uh you know sending across to people who
are fighting for you and for all of us
and starting the nation from the enemy
no i don’t
expect that but if you bear them in your
thoughts
if you acknowledge that there are people
who are fighting this battle not just
for money
the cause and the reason is
much larger let’s come back to a story
that i have to tell you
i was posted in german kashmir in year
2005
and this story is about hope so art of
survival we hope
hope is very very important in life you
know unless you have this hope that what
we
do tomorrow today becomes very very
difficult right we all have deposited
some money we’ve made some investment
we have uh invested in a lot of
relationships with this hope that life
will get better in time to come
isn’t it so this story is about
2005 third february to be precise
i was posted in guri’s a very beautiful
sector
sandwiched between dras and kargil
and i was supposed to replace an officer
from one of the posts i was an artillery
officer and an ordinary officer
typically the youngsters are sent on
observation posts wherein you can have
view into enemy territory and if
there is a requirement you can follow
your
arthritis to you know direct the fire in
the right direction
i started with the team of four other
ranks
i was the only officer because that was
the protocol they will
walk with me the total distance was
about 17 kilometers and i had to go and
replace another officer
and it was an incline of course uh about
3000 meters of height that i had to gain
over two days time so typically in this
17 kilometer 2005
technology was not really great even if
today if the technology is great
shiatsu and forward they’re not
connected through mobile and stuff like
that
so typically army works with a wired
communication
device okay you do like this someone
picks up
one side can only talk the other guy
will listen to you
[Music]
and in mountains typically if there is a
heavy snowfall
this wire is kind of
buried in the snow and if there is more
snowfall
it breaks because there’s so much of
weight and there’s so much that it can
take
so we started our journey on day one we
were supposed to reach
a post which was supposed to be a
maintenance post so maintenance post is
a team of
five people who actually check this
wiring
from richmond headquarter to the
maintenance post and regiment uh
maintenance post to the post where the
team is
the team which had taken me to the
maintenance post comes back
to the regiment and i was handed over to
the regiment post and next day morning
four o’clock my link was supposed to
start and go and replace the officer
it started snowing so most of you
the youngsters these days they go for
trekking and small amount editing
expeditions and stuff like that
if you don’t know if there is fresh
snowfall more than six inches to eight
inches
it is not prescribed that you move up
you are not
supposed to walk the next day
first
and the first news that we hear is that
the communication between regiment
headquarter and
maintenance post is broken so now we are
on radio sense
we are saying all okay
ninth february was my birthday that was
sixth day of
our stay
at the place
my mother was communicated
that your son is fine
he is somewhere he can’t call you
the communication is broken but he’s
fine
if it was your brother or if it was your
father who was posted in jama in kashmir
you have not been able to speak for six
days and someone tells you that okay
he’s fine
you would want to hear that yes he’s
fine but it is very hard to believe he
is one
but there is hope my wife was told that
he is fine
second year of marriage
days are gone and
the newspaper and media all over india
is now saying that jammu and kashmir has
received the most
unprecedented snowfall in last 50 years
the communication between post
and observation post maintenance post
and observation post
is broken and the snowfall
is about 18 feet and the place where we
were living in
has suddenly become avalanche probe
why because the snow on the rocky face
of the mountain
gets wobbly if there is anything
and it is it was not safe for that small
structure
for all of us because if
an avalanche came we all would have been
history so we moved to a
[Music]
was not possible for all of us to sleep
in the same porch
so if one moved everybody else would
move
25 days gone
the food was so much so
the ration the dry russian
and what we are doing there was no
officer there
there was no other rank there
there were individuals
the way we have created caste creed
religion society up market dawn market
syria subordinate too many words we have
known
nothing existed
one thing that existed was
no communication radio set batteries
have
died
regiment headquarters
nicole
and we all start
crying
you need to really go through certain
things in life to realize what actually
we realize that there is a possibility
of going back
and we went up the officer came down
all five of us are now connected on
i am an officer one is become a jco
three are having ours and we share the
nastiest of the joke possible on this
earth
in that group because we don’t exist for
each other
because i was an officer and they were
my subordinates and there was an
operator
we exist for each other as
life pillars we held each other’s home
we were each others everything to ensure
that we see a tomorrow we put together
in that
crap so ladies and gentlemen
my point and i would finish with this
we have a free country there are people
who are fighting for you there are
people who are dying for you
when we were not able to deal with
corona there were people who were
hit with iron rods embedded with nails
in them because
we sitting here can enjoy our freedom
as i said least
we can do is spear them in our mind
least we can do is be
worthy of it that someone dies
thank you so much
[Applause]
together can do anything
together thank you so much