Making one’s way through the harsh deserts in the Indian subcontinent is no easy task. If the heat doesn’t get to you, your body’s grappling metabolism will. It often takes the bravest of souls to battle it out in these tough conditions, where your biggest enemy is nature itself. My tryst with the desert happened several decades ago, when I was entrusted with the task of setting up a Land Range (to test Missiles where the launch Point and impact point of the missile are on land mass and the missile flies largely over land) for testing Prithvi Missile.) in my role as a young Deputy Project Director for Prithvi. In a country like ours which is densely populated, to identify such a large area with stipulated stringent safety regulations was a difficult task. The Indian Army has been using certain areas in the desert of Rajasthan, namely, Pokhran, Mahajan etc., to test artillery firing ranges. After a detailed study of the maps of these regions, we could conver...