Last week, my phone crackled well past midnight. “Sahab, kahan ho aaj kal (where are you these days)?” the caller spoke in a Haryanvi dialect. His voice sounded familiar. After an exchange of pleasantries, I realised it was the serving Subedar Major of my regiment calling from Lukung, the tip of Pangong Tso on the Indian side, not far from Galwan, where our troops saw action with the Chinese.
Suddenly, a wave of nostalgia washed over me, transporting me to circa 2000, when I, as the Brigade Major of this area, attended several border personnel meetings with the Chinese at their Moldo garrison. In my wildest of dreams, I could not imagine making a phone call from Pangong Tso in those days. Mobile phones were Greek to us. Our only lifeline with our families was a cumbersome contraption known as Inmarsat (International Maritime Satellite). While talking on this wonder box, our conversations were punctuated with unwelcome interruptions caused by the “echo effect”, peeving us no end. My wife and daughters had a harrowing time adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of this gizmo of that era. However, these minor hiccups never deterred us from queuing up at the military exchange just to know the well-being of our families.
My thoughts drift to my tenure in Lebanon where we all spent a princely sum of our hard-earned “foreign salary” on the costly telephone calls to our families back in India. It was not long back when soldiers communicated through red- and green-coloured “Forces Letters”, which used to take days to reach them. Red-coloured letters were authorised to officers who were supposed to self-certify the non-confidentiality of the contents inside, while green envelopes were for the soldiers who had to get a signature from their company commanders for censorship. Those were the snail-mail days in the Army when the information of safe arrival reached families days after the individual had even moved on to the next location. These days, it’s not only the safe arrival report but even the video of the food the soldier is having in his langar reaches his wife in a jiffy. The exchange of good and bad news is in real-time both ways. Any domestic dispute of a minor nature gets conveyed to the soldier deployed on the Line of Control in real time, thus causing more distress to the jawan.
With the distance, the problems seemingly get exaggerated. Looking back, I reflect that the soldiers of old times were far happier and stress-free. I vividly remember there was hardly any soldier in my company who had depression or hypertension. Suicide was unheard-of. They were more at peace with themselves. The joy we sensed during NDA or IMA evening order fall-ins when our Cadet Sergeant Major used to call out our names holding our letters from home was indescribable. Were the snail-mail days better than the ongoing era of mobiles? Perhaps the answer lies in the ability to master the use of your mobile and not let the mobile use you.
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Published – November 10, 2024 02:29 am IST