Colours of Glory

10/10/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/ponderings-of-a-pongo-8/

LIVING WITH THE PIONEERS A Tale of Ingenuity from the Fighting First ‘Fighting First’ – Descendants of the XXIII Sikh Pioneers Somewhere in the North, c/o 56 APO – to be precise, Meerut Cantonment, 1974–75 After a war, and having spent more than four and a half years in counter-insurgency ...

28/09/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/ponderings-of-a-pongo-7/

A Passage to SPR (Selected Place of Residence) I read an interesting narrative of one of my friends Ravi Nair, my namesake, about the good old times of his father, a VCO (Viceroy’s Commission Officer) coming on leave from Kashmir borders of NWFA (North West Frontier Agency) – where the latter wa...

21/09/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/ponderings-of-a-pongo-6/

THE OPPORTUNISTIC COMMANDER Mouque da Commander In the final reckoning, it is not success or failure that defines a soldier, but the values he chooses to uphold. In battle, it is seldom the firefight alone that defines command. Far more demanding is the moral battlefield – the constant tension bet...

14/09/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/when-alleppey-kept-time-without-wristwatches/

A Nostalgic Journey from the 1950s to the 1970s – Alleppey to the Army – and Beyond Watching the Amazon Prime serial “Titan – Made in India”, about the making of India’s first quartz watch and the remarkable story of how India challenged the centuries-old dominance of Swiss watchmakers, ...

05/09/2026

08/05/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/till-their-legs-will-swell/

Journals of An Itinerant Army Officer The reading eye craves something original. Something written that taps the tinfoil of memory and things forgotten through the eye. A book or article to one’s taste is rare to come by these days. Nay, these days anything new is hard to come by, so well educated...

04/05/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/the-window-ghost/

Journals of an Itinerant Army Officer Ghosts have distinct personalities and favour to move by lunar cycles. I have yet to hear of a ghost who simply rang the doorbell and entered through the main door of the house. I had always had a wish to be allotted a house with a ghost but had […]

29/04/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/robinhood-of-kathiawar-and-other-extraordinary-stories-from-indias-freedom-movement/

BOOK REVIEW Ordinarily, I am not given to emotions. But the extraordinary stories this extraordinary book narrates moistened my eyes a lot frequently. The book has fifty chapters, the last of which pays tribute to the Gandhian legacy. The rest of the chapters however, tell the stories of people who....

13/04/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/unequal-justice-in-uniform/

Recent court orders granting full pension to women Short Service Commission (SSC) officers of the Army—and earlier, of the Air Force—have been widely hailed as long-overdue justice. They are. But they also expose an uncomfortable and troubling truth: justice in uniform appears selective. For dec...

16/02/2026

https://www.coloursofglory.org/beyond-the-hero/

Reclaiming the Collective Story of War Indians are hero worshippers. They cannot help it, it’s inherent in their genes. That’s one of the reasons we find a string of war movies streaming out of Bollywood studios in recent times, depicting the life and times of one or other war hero, some of them...