On the occasion of Kargil Vijay Diwas, student organization Pahal.. an initiation, under the aegis of DSW, organized a live session “Vijay Gaatha 2.0” with three army officers who witnessed the 1999 Kargil war. Following the session of Major Vandana Sharma and Lt Gen Satish Dua, the last session of this series was with Major General Vikram Dev Dogra on 27th July 2021.
Maj Gen Vikram Dogra is an army general GOC 22 division. He is the only serving army officer and the only General to complete Ironman Triathlon twice, was awarded the Ati Vishishth Seva medal, recipient of Sword of honor, UN military observer, and four times TEDx speaker. He had served in the army for 41 years and got retirement in 2019. Currently, he is the star promoter and icon of the Kho-Kho Federation of India.
From his childhood days, he was surrounded by people in uniform and had great military influence. When the Kargil war took place, he was Lt Col then and was posted in the infantry division. He joined there as General staff officer Grade 1, in charge of operations of the division, training his team for battling any escalated situation if the war went long.
Describing the leadership quality, Maj Gen Vikram mentioned “The most important aspect of any leader is professional competence. You have to be good at your job and secondly, you must be morally upright and should come up as an idol to whom people look up to.” He also added that communication skills properly convey your ideas and vision. You should be approachable as a leader and the leader must walk the talk, you should be leading by self-example.
Maj Gen Vikram gave few essential insightful tips to the vertos appearing for SSB. He asserted that personal appearance is one of the aspects of SSB. The way you look, talk, going through all the tests are used to assess your character and officer-like qualities. SSB board members try to look for how genuine you are. You need to be confident, you can gain confidence by knowing what you are going for and knowledge gives confidence. One should be logical and positive in your responses when given a question or situation. You should train for it and implement it from the present moment only.
Maj Gen Vikram told that his biggest failure was not something that he was doing but it was not being prepared for the failure. Talking about his NDA academy days, he said that academy is the journey of becoming a man from a boy. It becomes part of your life and builds your endurance and adaptability physically as well as mentally. Anything and everything that you can imagine is there in NDA for extra-curricular activities. He then talked about the ‘puzzle of identity’ and inspired the vertos to do a SWOT analysis to understand themselves better. Society wants you to behave in a particular manner but it may not be who you are.
