Category: General

After the Colour Presentation Passing Out Parade in December 1978, it was the course NDA reunion in December 2016 that created the wave to pick up the threads to locate everyone and to get them onto one platform. The exponential power of the social media over platforms like WhatsApp/Telegram was extensively used to connect and data was gathered/stored on to a web platform 55nda.in. This website after the reunion ran out it’s two years rental and due to the steep fallout in traffic and value, the renewal wasn’t followed up and allowed to lapse. But wisely, Murali retained all the data on his own portal.

However, in the recent past, as most of us have/are transitioning from professional and domestic responsibilities to a stage where leisure steps up in priority, amongst many things, there is a definitive need to reconnect. Some of you wouldn’t be aware that a “Pachpan” Association is under formalization and the approval from authorities is expected anytime – there is a lot of intent to use the association to bond meaningfully. But on that, later in another blog.

The myriad posts that glue the course on WhatsApp has great appeal but it’s topic conversations/threads attention span gets drowned in either the mind-boggling traffic and/or the limited ability of the mobile’s capacity to store data and memories category wise. As smartphone users we are constantly bombarded with high volume of content in which verified information is muscled in to a corner with misleading digital texture. Some would debate this point but there is an obvious weakening of analytic ability — the capacity to distinguish between the essential and the inessential, truth and untruth. Across various social media groups these days and so very often, the urge to shut down an argument is the urge to shut down and force into submission the person making it. As potentially active citizens turn into passive consumers with diminished attention spans, relationships have become the unintended victim.

Cortisol is our primary fight-or-flight hormone. It releases triggers physiological changes, such as spikes in blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar, that help us react to and survive acute physical threats. These effects can be lifesaving if you are actually in danger – like say, you are being charged at by a bull. But our bodies also release cortisol in response to emotional stresses like a inflammable content of a social media post or an angry email from a senior. The average human being spends four hours staring at their phone screens and always keep it at an arm’s length. Whether we like/admit it or not, the smartphone has dramatically reconfigured us – but then, this again is not the direction of this blog post this day.

Now to rewind back to the web portal again. The value of a portal re-emerged by a sample response picked up mostly on Telegram and though the old website www.55nda.in was the choice, it wasn’t available – there are cyber squatters who can really be spoil sports. After bouncing around with options, www.55nda.com was available, is now live, with all the data retrieved in place and a reality. The web portal is being funded by the Pachpan Association by the left funds of the December 2016 reunion. Now let us look at the endless opportunities that we get out here.

The blogs that were written and supposedly forgotten by Satish Vaidya, Jimmy Thomas, Murali and Mukesh Prasad are all there, just like new.

All the music that had been suggested and uploaded back in 2016. Folks add more and more there.

Some of us maybe not be fully aware but we have a project “Pachpanresorts” which now has its own domain name: www.pachpanresorts.in. I will leave it to Atul and the gang that set this up to explain more. We have a WhatsApp group driven by popular demand at the last course gathering hosted by Surinder at his Western Army Commander’s palatial residence at Chandigarh. Jassi Chopra drives this, HS Sethi has already put the details of his Bhutan visit and will be posting his Alaskan cruise later this year. All that, can now come up to be hosted at this website, where information would be just a couple of clicks away.  

All the photos and videos of your trips can be hosted here, it will allow others to get an audio-visual advisory of what all can be done.

All the course sojourns that the Pachpan Association has in mind will find its place here.    

There is a 55 Invest group which has limited membership but where pearls of wisdom have been offered by the financial wizards – Atul Madan, Sanjeev Khanna and many more. We have some ladies too on that group who look for financial advice on investments.

Satish Dua has embarked, so far on two rounds of TED talks, the links can be hosted here and you won’t have to search for it.

The blog space will accommodate all the debates that we want to get into. Instead of short machine gun burst like, short WhatsApp posts, there can be more articulation and enunciation. The topics can vary – politics (the current favorite), the state of national security, what ails the defence forces, issues with CSD, ECHS, the choice is endless. There is a lot of passion in these debates – I think that directionally everyone has the best national interests in mind – thoughts differ on the various paths that lead to that destination. Every election digs deeper – mostly not on issues that are concerning, but on a stridence, that has a rather crass, volumetric appeal. The volume quotient best seen at prime-time TV, challenges common sense, warps the narrative and burns seriousness.      

We would of course be looking for volunteers to manage the content of these specific pages. Like I am sure that Jassi Chopra would like to project his WhatsApp management of “Travelogue” to the web. And financial wizard Sanjeev Khanna can be assisted by other volunteers to manage the “Investment” page. The “Pachpan Resorts” by Atul Madan who in any case has a such large portfolio of course related management that we wouldn’t want to increase his burdens.   

Why wouldn’t each one of us, want to leave to leave a legacy – all your thoughts expressed on blogs, articles carried/hosted on www.55nda.com. Subtle thoughts, that can startle when read down the memory lane by their prescience.

I have been, and perhaps not unfairly so, been referred to as the king of verbiage – I should and must apply suppression to being long winded, and know when to stop. With this ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your very own web site – www.55nda.com, here is wishing the maximum (and multiplying) benefits to all.    

Cheers……

Saw the movie “Madaari” about bridges falling and killing people.  The movie says bridges fall because of ministers.  If only the ministers were good, the bridges would not fall.

Searching the web, I learned that construction collapses are rather common in India.

I wondered, why don’t bridges and buildings fall in the USA and kill people?

Then I realized, that’s not strictly true.  Sometimes a barge or something hits a bridge, sometimes a tornado can break a bridge.

But bridges or buildings falling by themselves?

Yes, that can happen.  Parts of a bridge fell in Boston, and killed a woman driver.  Long time ago, I think 1990s.  Single incident, sticks in mind, because it was so single!

Turned out the bridge in Boston fell because the construction companies worked for Mafia, and they were stealing the government money by supplying shoddy material and cutting corners…

So corruption can cause bridges to fall.  In USA.  And also in India, I think.

The difference is, in the USA people are honest.  They can turn dishonest, no doubt.  Even the most honest person can be forced into dishonesty, or fall into dishonesty.  But as a general rule, people are honest to start with.  So corruption happens some of the time, and is limited.

In India, it seems it would be a miracle for somebody to be honest in ANY bridge or building project.  Any honest person would be forced into dishonesty, so it’s safe to say there are no honest people in such projects.

The movie was totally lying.  The bridges do not fall because of politicians.  Absolutely not.  Politicians are just convenient scapegoats for evil ghoulish movie-makers out to make money from deaths, without addressing the real issues.

Bridges fall because of the people.

The people who die under the bridge – take any one of them.  Put him/her in a Public Works Department office as a government official.  Is there any, any, chance that he/she would not have taken bribes from the contractors?

Make him/her a contractor.  Is there any, any, chance that he/she would not have given bribes and cut costs from material?

So who is to blame?

I recently had an interaction with a young man from India over the Facebook.  He wanted to know what a “real man” meant.

I gave him the example of the Gurkha retired soldier, who defended a young girl from being raped by a mob of 40 people.  (It wasn’t that difficult for him apparently to face 40 people, once he got into crazy mode, he just had to kill 3 of them with his Khukari, cut another 8, and the brave rapists then fled despite their heavy numerical superiority.)

The guy was upset over the example!!  Hard to believe for me.  The guy was uttering words like patriarchy and misogyny (hatred of females) and all.  I didn’t get it – what did he want, the Gurkha should have let the young girl get raped, in the name of female equality?

The young man didn’t make any sense in his ramblings. I basically told him, as he seemed to be an intellectual young fella, look – you all should just go and learn how to use condoms, and go out have sex between willing boys and girls!  India has a lot of sexual repressions, which leads to rape.  Be revolutionary, destroy your chains.

He ignored this sage piece of advice, and kept ranting and raving about how I didn’t understand patriarchy and misogyny.

I still didn’t get it.  What patriarchy?  That’s a Western Abrahamic concept, in India the deities include women (Durga, Kali) etc, and the society is a mixed patriarchy-matriarchy.  What misogyny?  He was the one saying the Gurkha should have let the young girl get raped… If that’s not misogyny, what is?

Then I realized.  The dude had no clue what “patriarchy” and “misogyny” meant.  He had read it in some Western articles, rote-memorized the words, and kept repeating whenever something involved with women came along!

This, I felt, is rather sad.  When even your intellectualism, your deep thoughts, are not your own – you have to borrow from an alien world without understanding that world’s concepts – how can the young face the real problems in India?  Using the tools (concepts) from an alien culture cannot help them, they have to invent their own tools that really apply to the situation!

Murali talks about “Appy Times”.  Hot stuff is happening in computing technology, all these apps are coming out, new technology to build those apps is coming out…

As someone working in the software field, surely I would be up to all the latest, and know all the buzz-words and tehnologies?

Not really!  When Murali asked me about bootstrap, a popular framework for mobile “first projects”, I had no clue what that was!  In fact, on my Android phone, I had absolutely NO apps at all, except what I needed for my work.  Until a few months ago when I ran into 55-NDA again and downloaded Telegraph and Whatsapp!  So I am really not an “appening” dude.  I really have no clue about the latest app that just came out and will cook lunch, or whatever…

I have seen more “next biggest thing”s in technology die rather than live.  Even when they don’t die, they change.  I worked on something called VisiCalc, which back then was considered a revolutionary technology.  It was the original spreadsheet, and for the first time made businesses take personal computers seriously.  But it’s no longer around, long ago replaced by something called Microsoft Excel.

I saw a language called “Ada” which was going to change the world – nowhere now.  There was Pascal before that.  Even things which succeed, have limited life-span.  The “C” language once was used for everything.  Then its bigger better version called C++ came along.  Now it’s been entirely  replaced by Java (and on Apple side of things, “Swift”) and new programmers haven’t even heard of “C” or “C++”.  Lisp was once the coolest thing in the programming world.  Now, nobody knows what that is.

So when I come across the “next biggest thing”, now I have a wait-and-see approach.  If it survives, it will eventually come my way… and ideally someone will pay me to learn it!  Though sometimes I have to scramble – and learn some new thing that has rapidly taken over –  on my own before I can get a job in it.

For an intellectual hobby, I have kept up with physics.  Things seem a little more permanent there.  Force still equals mass times acceleration.

This is a simple platform to blog. write about anything on earth. you can publish it , have people comment on it . Upload photographs, videos… .All I can give you is an username and a password . then you are on your own… Cheers ! -M