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Wednesday, June 10, 2015

A Fauji and his Baggage

Well baggage is baggage; what is so different about a fauji's house hold baggage ? He is always on the move, every year or two. I can hear a civilian friend saying, "What's so great in 'relocation' ? even we do that you know ? I mutter to myself 'From Bombay to Bhopal (and back after a year)'. Having criss-crossed this great Bhatratvarsh from East to West and North to South, with 22 moves in 36 years , that is not the kind of 'relocation' I am talking about. 

 A Fauji is posted to places, which to a civilian will not even qualify to be called a place. A typical conversation may go like this "hi where are you these days ?", 'Binaguri'... 'where's it?', 'New Jalpaiguri ... that's near Siliguri' 'and where is that ?' 'somewhere near Darjeeling' 'Oh ! You are at Darjeeling, why didn't you say that ? nice place eh ?'

or it could be 'Samba', ' near Pathankot' ending up as "So you are in Kashmir ?"

    I am digressing, let us go into the details of a fauji household baggage.

   A typical fauji household baggage would have an assortment of stuff. In addition to regular stuff like TVs, Refrigerators, Air conditioners and kitchen gadgets, you will encounter some place-speific essentials ; Woollen clothings , quilts and a Kero-heater  to survive himalayan winters (a room-heater actually working on kerosene) popular at Dharchula (one can  google to find the loc), a  heavy duty voltage stabilizer to bring up the voltage from 75V to 200V or a  diesel generator (for  places where power supply is near zero and  a couple of Desert Coolers (for our western regions). You can't discard any stuff any time as by now you are only too aware as to how indispensable these  are at places where you bought them . And one never knows the place of the next tenure and if there is anything to go by , you can consider Murphy's law for fauji postings "Thou shalt see three postings along the coastal areas once you have acquired desert coolers to survive in Thar Desert and  enough woollens and jackets for a trip to Tibet . I  speak from personal experience.

      Original idea was to write about how the stuff is moved but as it has been a long preamble , that would follow in the next post.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cannot get out of the fauji mould I guess.

Unknown said...

Sir I wonder why no ESM is making it big in movers and packers business with our varied experience.