Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Life in AFA(Air Force Academy ) - pre reporting

After almost 9 month long process of CDS Written Exam, Selection Board at 1 AFSB and Medical Checkup at AFCME , the path to AFA was now clear.

It was just a formality but after the long and patient wait for the merit list of CDSE was over, the result was declared by UPSC. It was a really nice surprise to find my name on the top of the merit list. WOW !!!
So I was off to a good start. But as it happens with all of us everytime, once you have finished something a worry of the future starts to occupy your mind and in my case I started wondering if I could maintain my steam and will I be good enough to be selected for Fighter Stream after Trifurcation in the Academy.

The answer to this lied almost 1 year in future. To ease any worries I started off with a routine of daily morning running and other exercises to get in shape. Now as my bad luck would have it I found out the really hard and painful way that in my circumstances its better to avoid joining a Gym and more doing Dead-Lift without proper care. This caused me to have symptoms of hernia(or so I thought) and my subsequent lingering worries were not settled down till a Medical Examination in the Academy.




I am being so close to realizing a dream of a life time. I am sure life will rise to a different gear once the training start. Training in AFA will bring across several anecdotes and definitely a lot of memories which I will want to remember.

But the disappointing fact is that there is hardly any first person account which one comes across about life of a Flight Cadet in AFA. The purpose of this series will be to fill this gap, so that a lot of dreamers like me can know more about flying training in IAF.

Before I finish this post, I should mention one more incident.
Once I got through medicals, I went to a retired Maj. Gen. who was a faculty in my college, to get his advice on how to do well in Service. He had some gems of experience to recount.
He told me that in Defence Services a person is quite often identified by the company of people he is into. Like if you hang around with geeks you will be labeled as a geek similarly if you hang around with people having questionable incidences to their name, so will people think you to be. And in Service like Indian Airforce the size is not so big and your reputation, both good and bad, travels far and wide.

Another of his suggestion was that the Defence Services are such that they require a certain set of qualities and requirement and the training and subsequent service makes sure that you inculcate those qualities and the things in you which are not desirable gets filtered out. So one should always take care because we as a cadet and later as Officers will be judged all the time for the OLQs.

9 comments:

  1. thnx a lot...very nicely written

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  2. I have also cleared my ssb and medical for cdse entry and waiting for merit list...feeling nervous!!!

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  3. I have my afsb on 29 of Feb need some guidance

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  4. Are there cyber cafes at AFA and are we trained on all 7 days of the week or is there a holiday on Sunday and we are allowed to go out of academy ?

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    1. A few cyber cafe are present in AFA but they can be accessed on few of the Sundays.

      Holiday is quite a relative concept as I understand !
      There are a few occasions when you are allowed to go out for a fixed number of hours from AFA but for that you have to earn it by performing well.

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  5. Very well written sir.
    Hope to see you soon.

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