Boot camp The trouble with being a citizen of a country that enforces conscriptions is that there is no easy way to avoid serving the nation. If you are man enough, you grin and bear two and a half years of torturous national service. If you are not man enough, you still serve, but  your energies are concentrated on coming out alive! Anyways, the first time I heard the words ‘Boot Camp’, was when I was nearing the compulsory conscription age. I heard some of the guys in the locker room mention it with the kind of dread that is reserved for ghosts, ghouls and other such creepy phenomenon. Although the very term sent my flesh crawling for cover, I put up a brave front and ventured to ask a buddy what a boot camp was. I might as well have asked him if he were a cannibal. The chap was horrified and the enigma of the boot camp only deepened. The day before I was shunted off to boot camp, my dad (who is an ex-serviceman by the way) bid me a tear filled good bye and exhorted me to be the very best I could. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how mortified I was by the prospect of going off to boot camp. With hindsight, I probably should have wailed and begged for mercy and asked him to get me off the hook. But I didn’t have this hindsight then. Let’s just say that I spent the next couple of years in boot camp going through all the hell imaginable and then some more. I was screamed at, exercised to death, made to circle the globe thrice over (with my backpack on my shoulders), stay awake for days on end, feed off grub that my dog back home would scoff at, bullied, assaulted, intimidated… basically everything that you never hope is done to you, was done to me. As far as I was concerned, boot camp was sheer hell. To say that I came out of the experience unscathed and unhurt would be blatantly lying. I’m pretty sure the cold sweat I break into when I am dream… having my nightmares is a by product of my days spent in the boot camp. I am also sure that my non-confrontational nature and general timidity is a lifelong gift that the boot camp has endowed me with. But above all, I look back at my days in the boot camp with absolute and unresolved incredulity. Which warped human could have come out with a concept like a boot camp? I now know that there are boot camps for troubled teens, boot camps for difficult boys, boot camps for juvenile delinquents (is it just me or does the word boot camp always have something to do with the more unsavory elements of human kind?) But despite knowing that these kids, vile as they are, probably deserve to be in those boot camps, I have nothing but sympathy for all of them. To think that just a few years after getting out of these boot camps, they will have to get through the one I barely managed to sneak out of!