Twentyone-year old Santosh Anarse from Alsunde village in Ahmednagar district is grit and determination personified. It took Anarse, not one, not two, not three, but as many as ten attempts to finally get selected as a jawan in the Indian Army.
Twentyone-year old Santosh Anarse from Alsunde village in Ahmednagar district is grit and determination personified. It took Anarse, not one, not two, not three, but as many as ten attempts to finally get selected as a jawan in the Indian Army. Anarse was drafted into the Maratha Light Infantry (MLI), one of the elite, infantry regiments of the Indian Army, last week.
Anarse is one of a few hundred successful young men in the 18-23 age group to find his name in the selected list among the 36,000, who were tested by the Indian Army at Ahmednagar in October 2010 to join various corps.
Making light of his hard work, Anarse told DNA at the army’s recruitment centre in the Southern Command on Friday, “I wanted to be an army man since I was a child. I appeared for the entrance tests, four times in Pune and one each at Beed, Nashik, Aurangabad, Osmanabad and Kolhapur, before becoming successful at Ahmednagar in October. I am extremely proud and happy today.”
Anarse, a National Cadet Corps (NCC) cadet in college, has even attended a national integration camp in Jammu and Kashmir two years ago.
Likewise, Mahesh Dhumal, 21, from the Pimpale Dhumal village near Shirur, 60 km from Pune, is also joining the MLI regiment in Belgaum. Dhumal, who lost his father due to snake bite when he was barely three, has been brought up by his mother, Alka.
“My mother encouraged me to study. One of my maternal uncles is a retired army man. I told myself, if my uncle could wear the army uniform, so could I,” he said.
While Manoj Nimonkar, 19, is emulating his older brother, Pravin, 21, who joined the Army’s Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (EME) as a soldier last year.
Fresh from the experience of attending the Republic Day parade in Delhi as a NCC cadet, the tall, strapping boy, a MLI recruit, said, “We have 18 acres of farm land in the Jamkhed taluka of the Ahmednagar district, but my brother and I always wanted to become soldiers. We can serve the country best this way.”
Colonel Bharat Dabral, the officer incharge of recruiting, told DNA that the response to the ‘soldier technical’ category from students who had completed standard XII with physics, chemistry and mathematics had increased substantially in the recent times. “There has been a qualitative improvement,” Dabral said.
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