When General Manoj Mukund Naravane, India's new Chief, spoke yesterday to the men and women that he commands, he wasn't just advising them. He was passing an order.
Pakistani forces had fired a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile at our helicopter, possibly a US-made Stinger or Swedish RBS-70, widely considered some of the most potent weapons of its class in the world.
If the next set of Google Earth images were to show fresh Chinese construction in the disputed Doklam plateau, there would be likely be front page headlines on "China renews construction in Doklam despite Modi-Xi talks in Wuhan.'
For years, cherry-picked data on the Arjun tank's faults seemed to highlight a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles - the tank was too heavy, it wasn't reliable and it couldn't fire an anti-tank missile. This is all true, but was this reason enough to stifle the growth of the indigenously built tank?
It had never happened before - an Indian and a Chinese anchor sitting next to each other - one bound by protocol and state control, and the other bound essentially by the belief that asking questions, any question, was my democratic birth right.
It was a strange coincidence - just an hour after anchoring a show on road safety in our country, I was out on a shoot, chatting with my cameraperson Ashok Mahale, when he nonchalantly told me something really special - something I thought I would share.
The Indian Air Force today briefly landed a Mirage 2000 fighter-bomber on the Yamuna Expressway in Uttar Pradesh to validate the capability of the jet to land on civilian roads in the event of an emergency.
In nearly two decades of covering extreme conflict and natural disasters, I have often asked myself whether it's right to be asking questions to people who have been badly affected - orphans, widows, people who have lost their near and dear ones.
More than 15 years ago, when I reported from the snout of the Siachen glacier for the first time, the Indian Army's Siachen base camp was nothing more than a military outpost in the most unimaginably desolate surrounding.
