ARTICLE - TO BE OR NOT BE

As junior officer’s wife life was pretty simple. Even if I felt like little Oliver Twist every now then, in a foreign atmosphere, with senior ladies complaining about my lack of commitment to the causes of the tambola, my suffering was bearable. As a Commanding Officer’s wife I found myself in a stickier position.

Where are the ladies I thought as I looked askance! It was payback time and I was in a real mood to groom (read grill) the young ones to the accepted norms of the army. The legacy of the unwritten (at times harrowing) Do’s and the Don’ts that kept me on my toes and my weight down to the minimum- had to be passed on.

Where are the ladies? I sent frantic circulars. It seemed some were pregnant, others busy with little babies, still others were recovering from assorted aches and anxiety and the enviable working lot was just too tired. A smart second generation army wife even reminded me that she didn’t come under the Army Act and so I better know my limits. This was the last straw and a bit of blow under the belt.

Are times changing? Was it always so difficult being the mother in law of the unit? My earliest memories of utter unfathomable grief at being frequently misunderstood as a young wife paled in comparison to the new challenges I faced. Is it possible that my senior ladies were equally helpless when they doled out the bitter pills of adjustment rules in the army? “Be grateful of the perks you receive”…No vehicles and canteen facilities for you if you don’t chip in happily for the community meets.”

But I never faked. I always had a genuine problems – either I was pregnant or I had a small baby or I was recovering from assorted aches and anxiety… thereafter when I started working it was impossible for me to make time for anything. Why did they not understand my plight? I would yelp. I had already served my term in the SFA’s mending and fending for myself to feel guilty about the perks I was enjoying with my husband around. I never even got the ration when my husband was away. I was frequently relegated to status of a second class citizen in his absence, which made me wonder if the army ever really cared about ME… The last thing I wanted was to be blackmailed into doing anything. But those days we never dared say as much.

The newer lot is as always bolder, brasher and truer to their own self. When they spoke up and expressed their disgruntlement, I had no choice but to listen. I must be standing at the historic cross roads watching a sweeping change come over, I thought. I didn’t really know how to handle this at all. In the army where conforming to establishment is its basic ethos bending a rule takes considerable vision. Just hacking at it creates enormous trouble. Rebelliousness could bring about creativity but there was little scope for such experimentation here. I felt helpless.




Can there be an alternative to Ladies Club I mused when I saw my ladies finally trickling in. There was unhappiness writ large on their face… Qualified girls, who found the meets utterly predictable and boring – Busy professionals who found them an utter waste of time- and harried housewives who wished they had more help when they were asked to come out for rehearsals. I was the only one who infact had all the help she needed and also the time to sit back and enjoy an evening of tambola .They envied me for that. They found it a little unjust too. Fair enough!

The fact that it was just once a month, did not make things any easier for them. They had to attend the usual parties and get-togethers. They had their visits to the hospitals and relatives all the way to Delhi and back. Unexpected guests and virals and diarrhoeas had to be attended to. There was the daily fatigue of office /school work if they had a job to boot… “Where is the time for rehearsals Mrs Sengupta?” they pleaded.

I had to admit times had changed. More and more qualified ladies have sought to keep themselves busy and to earn that extra buck too take you beyond the shoe string budget of an army life. It is a favourable trend. People should be encouraged as far as possible to be self reliant, to achieve their own self actualisation. From Manesar ladies travelled several kms in search of a good job. The city life had its temptations too. The malls, the pubs, the exotic eating joints were all too alluring to ignore completely. Who knows where the next posting might be? In the changing social configurations, the mandatory once a month, Ladies Club on Fridays at 5 pm, was a bit of an anomaly. People were not really looking forward to it. It was a ritual that they observed without any excitement.

Even while I empathised with them I wondered how I would explain that army drills were not really tyrannical attempts at flogging people to subservience. They served a purpose too. Be it the Welfare, Mandir Parade or the Ladies Club it took into consideration the welfare of an average wife…The ones who are possible sitting at home with little to do. There are fewer and fewer of them everyday but there are still those one odd newly weds who are extremely shy , one odd wife with a language problem and then those whose husbands were away on some duty/course. Isn’t it our responsibility to look after them? Can we have a separate set of rules for each of us?


“Come on be a sport the ladies club is a unique opportunity to develop your personality,” I told the housewife- “An opportunity to hone your managerial skills and teach others about time management”, I explained the professionals- “A platform to share your talent”, I consoled the qualified ones. Let’s do things differently if you wish but let’s enjoy this camaraderie and do something for each other. Let’s come out of our cocoon and live for another.


With the silven in my hair I had understood that army drills were not just about guiltily paying back the perks we enjoyed either. It was a simple survival tactic. The sooner we mastered it, the better. Even the trivial tambola had its own place if you thought of it. When running against time has become the norm of the day and even our ladies are juggling around with ever new and challenging roles, tambola is a subtle relaxation technique. If you notice there is nothing cerebral about it. No sweating either till you say YES. You have to blank out your mind and concentrate on the numbers and just breathe in and out. What a unique way to recharge yourself. And you thought Ladies clubs were a sheer waste of time?

Well hopefully there will be a more novel and creative things to do in times to come. One has to come forward with better, newer, more fascinating ideas to maintain certain liveliness in the environment. One has to be bold and courageous to bring about these changes. One must consciously use this opportunity to learn about time management and handling interpersonal relations-Opening out to possibilities galore of discovering oneself as a person and someone else. One must learn to use every platform to interact and share knowledge, expertise and ideas.

Yes we can certainly have fewer meets, at more convenient timings. Once in two or three months at 6.30 for an hour, should serve the purpose. Probably we should just go out shopping, or attend a good cultural show together, see a movie and invite guest speakers to talk to us, take up a cause and work for it, organise some thing for our children. We can brainstorm on all these issues concerning us or just organise a talk show to tell each other about our perspectives and experiences as a young wife, as a mother and so on.

Whatever new ways and forms we adopt it is bound to become boring with repetition. Any new drill which becomes a disciplined effort will become dull at some point of time. Yes we must keep the freshness and the fun alive .We must also realise that we will need certain drills to bond and grow as sisters in joy and pain. That’s the bottom line. Remember we are a class by ourselves. True we don’t fall under the Army rule but the army nevertheless rules our lives.