Team Sampada: Our readers would be interested to know more about your career experience. What made you decide to choose this career path?
Grp Captain Sundeep Desai: I never knew I was destined for this career in the Armed forces. Retrospectively, the way 9/11 impacted the world as we knew it in those times was probably the push that I felt. I was already working in National Semiconductors, then located on the 3rd floor of Leela Palace, with a plush job, exceptional content of working on analog and digital devices and a befitting salary, it was everything that a software engineer could look up to.
I would not deny the charm of donning a uniform, which I felt was the most noble profession in my time. While other government jobs are either jobs or personnel working call themselves civil servants, the armed forces are called voluntary services for a reason, I guess. Emails where the companies were “pink-slipping” employees in those times made me realize if everything was a means to an end or was I to do something more? I had applied for all the arms of the defense forces during my final year at UVCE and got a call from the IAF. As luck would have it, none approved of my choice including my friends at office citing reduction in pay, staying away from family etc. I listened to my heart and took the plunge.
TS: Can you share some memorable experiences during your days in the Indian Armed Forces?
Grp Cap SD: I have served 20 years in the IAF, not a day has passed which was not enjoyed. This is true for every “soldier”. Tough, life and death, hazardous situations all seem like a joke now but when we endured it, we never felt the gravity of the situation. There are innumerable counts of professional experience, some mind-numbing, some exciting and some that border between dare-devilry and sanity.
The best moments I cherish are the bonds that we establish during training. I do not know of any brotherhood, where I can call up a guy in the middle of the night or meet one with the same vigor and freshness 20 years later. We are one huge family and in the IAF, we have a culture of bouncing homes and it’s a privilege of the bachelors. Very often imagine a group of 20-30 people descending on your home at unearthly hours and yet the homemaker cheerfully caters to all of them. I have been on both ends, as a ’bouncer’ you show how close the host is to you personally, as the host (generally a Senior) you feel gratitude for the love, affection and respect showered.
TS: What are your memories about UVCE?
Grp Cap SD: I initially got into UVCE in the Mechanical Branch. The quadrangle in front of the library and two gigantic trees was our ’adda’. This is a clearly engraved in every UVCEians mind. Later, when I fared well in the 1st year, I shifted to Computer Science. I think what I earned in UVCE was not a degree but a few invaluable friends for life. In many ways, my life at UVCE was defined by my association with my friends. I had a unique advantage of having the best friends of both the Mechanical and Computer Science worlds and cherish them even to this day.
Would I think of any other college even to this day? I would say no. Having seen a good crop of engineers in the past 20 years, irrespective of all the accolades, supra- infrastructure, there is one thing in my opinion that does not benignly come out in most of the colleges these days. There is a difference between people who come from centers of teaching and those who come from centers of learning. I think UVCE in this regard makes you a self-made person where there is no spoon feeding. In my opinion, the first day of a profession begins on the first day of college in the case of UVCE. This self-start, I guess is what propels us professionally even to this day. So, we need to give credit to UVCE for that.
TS: What advice would you like to give the current students? Many Of them Might not be aware about the opportunities In the Armed Forces.
Grp Cap SD: I would be wide off the mark to say that current students would be unaware of the armed forces and the opportunity it provides. I am no great achiever to advice students who are smarter than what we were in our days. Yet I have a few drawn from my own experience.
· Follow your heart. In the long run, everyone around you including you are in the same pedestal of life.
· If you plan to live fully and if working is an integral part of it, you have arrived, everything is sorted after this. The sum of life is not only about how well we live but how well we die.
· Staying fit is most important both mentally and physically.
· At least do one deed a day that would impact, make sense or benefit the society while you mandatorily gain nothing out of the act.
· The Armed forces is a different way of life and a select few make it. We can serve the nation at every level; it is just that the Armed forces make supreme sacrifices with lives to serve that makes it larger than life. The least that I expect an UVCEian to do is pay respects and thank people for their service.
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