JOIN USAsk 19-year-old Priyanka Chand Oswal, what’s the most awesome memory of her life and her answer is: “Catching and cutting a live cobra and then eating it raw.” Not too many teenagers can make that claim, unless, of course, you cross the globe and start interviewing Bushmen from Namibia or the Australian aborigines.
Priyanka, a physics student at Abasaheb Garware College, Pune, is one of the five finalists just out of the Mission Army experience and, for her, the aftershocks continue. There is an endearing I-still-can’t-believe-I-did-it breathlessness in her voice. At Infantry School, Belgaum, doing the Commando course that no lady officer has done so far (because the infantry does not take lady officers yet), she had to eat a snake and a frog as part of survival training.
Besides this, she has fired tanks, used explosive devices to break down doors, climbed a rope and walked a plank to jump into a pool from 18 meters and almost stepped off a helicopter at 3,800 feet to dive into Nasik’s clear blue sky. Well, almost! “I was at the door with the parachute on my back, ready to jump, and then suddenly my mind went blank. The instructor realised he was pushing me out and took me off at the last moment.
I couldn’t do it,” she says, regretfully. But then that’s exactly what the reality show is all about. It claims to separate the (I won’t say ‘girls’) men from the boys, in Army parlance. Ela Vohra, 23, the other female finalist, managed it just fine. Her memorable moment is of floating through space, dangling from an open parachute, the wind on her face.
National Geographic’s Mission Army, presently running on Indian television, is a docu-reality show that is giving non-army citizens a chance to have the army experience upfront. And this has been done in a very innovative way — by simply chucking in five medically fit, mentally robust, young Indians at the deep end and letting them flap their limbs to feel the current.
According to Ramon Chibb, VP, Content for National Geographic Channel, the brain behind the show, “Mission Army stands out from other reality shows because it puts real people in real situations. We made sure to go through all aspects of the army, right from the selection stage to medical to training in an academy in branches like infantry, artillery, aviation and ordnance. Our aim was to highlight the sheer difficulty level of training undertaken by an Indian army soldier.” The objectives were well met, it seems.
“It was like living a dream for one-and-a-half months,” says management student Kuldeep Rana, 24, from JIMS, who admits he gets high on adventure. Riding a T-90 tank was like driving a Honda City and snake flesh was equally smooth on the tongue, he says. Having already landed a job with a French company, he takes the Army experience with him. Rana is a rare finalist who does not have a career in the forces in mind. Fitness club owner Rohan Takalkar, 24, has simply got even more convinced about what he wants to do in life. “Earlier, I just wanted to join the army, now I want to be in the Paras — it is the most adventurous force,” he says.
The reality show gave its participants a chance to train in the Indian Military Academy, but what probably matters more is that it also taught them a few non-physical lessons. “I learnt that the human body has almost no limits. It is your thinking that makes you tough,” says Rohan. “I have learnt to focus on my goal. I have also learnt that sometimes you can’t see your goal but you know the right path to it. So if you keep walking, it will lead you where you want to go.”
Rather philosophical for a 24-year-old, but then that’s a gift from his Mission Army experience. And a lesson that will stand him in good stead whatever mission life puts him on.