Rohit Tikoo
Name of Book : From Borderline To Byline
Author : Colonel Satish Singh Lalotra (Retd.)
Publisher: Evincepub Publishing | First Edition, February 2026 | 253 pages | Rs 400
There is a particular kind of seeing that comes only from standing watch. Not the hurried gaze of the tourist or the methodical sweep of the scientist, but something quieter and more intimate – the attention of someone who has been made responsible for a place. Colonel Satish Singh Lalotra (Retd.) has spent decades doing exactly that. And the result, From Borderline to Byline, is among the most honest, illuminating and unexpectedly moving books to emerge from the Indian military experience in a very long time.
Let me be clear about what this book is not. It is not a battlefield memoir. There are no heroic last stands, no dispatches from the fog of war, no triumphant accounts of borders defended and enemies repelled. This is not that kind of soldier’s story. And therein lies its singular power. What Colonel Lalotra has written is something far rarer: a chronicle of the world that exists beyond maps and mandates, a record of what one disciplined, curious, deeply humane man chose to notice when duty took him to the edges of India.
An Archive of Attention from the Frontiers
The book is structured across six richly populated parts: Heritage, Memory and Identity; Tourism, Culture and Living Heritage; Survival in Extreme Terrain; Fairs and Festivals; A Rendezvous with the Wild; and In the Company of Books. Thirty-seven chapters. Over 250 pages. Each one a window into a corner of India that most of us will never visit, narrated by a man who was not visiting at all – he was serving, living, inhabiting.
Walong was not a biodiversity hotspot on a map for Colonel Lalotra – it was where he commanded troops. Gurez was not a trekking trail – it was a theatre of operations where he served in 2003, listening to locals speak of vanished wildlife. Burtse on the LAC was not a geological curiosity to marvel at – it was a contested coordinate, a place of vigil. When he writes about these locations, that weight of responsibility infuses every line. You are not reading reportage. You are reading witness testimony.
The Creatures, the Communities and the Cosmos
What strikes a reader immediately is the sheer, almost overwhelming range of this book’s curiosity. In a single chapter, the Colonel takes you inside the Indian Army’s decision – six decades in the making – to finally induct Bactrian camels for high-altitude logistics. But rather than write about tactical deployment, he writes about the animal itself: its bushy eyebrows, its broad calloused feet, its extraordinary habit of eating snow. He is genuinely fascinated, not by what the camel can do for the military, but by what makes it magnificently suited to survive where it does.
Then there is the Markhor – that magnificent wild goat now, in the Colonel’s sober phrase, in the cross hairs of human depredation. Populations that once stood at fifty-five individuals have dwindled to three. Transmission lines slice through habitat. Roads bisect sanctuaries. The Colonel does not lecture. He does not moralize. He simply reports, with the quiet devastation of someone who was there when the counting still mattered.
And then there are the otters. When the Colonel served at Badaub in 2003, locals told him about wildlife that had vanished – the Eurasian otter, known locally as “Chusham” in Ladakh and “Chustam” in Kargil, had disappeared from Kashmir’s waterways. Two decades of silence. Then, recently, a villager’s footage captured three otters in the Kishan Ganga River at Markoot, gorging on rainbow trout. The Colonel understands this is not simply a feel-good story. It is evidence of improved ecosystem health – and a fragile gift threatened by unchecked border tourism and shrinking prey populations. He knows the difference between hope and assurance. In this book, he offers us both.
Heritage Lived, Not Observed
Some of the book’s most memorable passages are devoted not to wildlife but to people. The Wakhi shepherdesses of Gilgit-Baltistan – women who once crossed glacial wastelands for three days at a stretch, walking eight hours daily through rain, snow and searing cold, carrying children on their backs while their husbands farmed in the valleys below. Women who walked barefoot into ice at 16,000 feet, dressed in simple robes. Women who now fund roads and send their children to study medicine and engineering. These are not footnotes to the military story of that region. In Colonel Lalotra’s telling, they are its beating heart.
Equally arresting is the chapter on Mahua – the heritage liquor of the Bhil and Bhilala tribal communities of Central India. Stationed at Itarsi, the Colonel had watched Korku tribal women collecting Mahua flowers at dawn along the highway. Years later, in a spirit shop in Goa, he recognised the same liquor and bought a bottle – not for the drink, but for the connection: to a people, to a practice, to the slow reclamation of indigenous dignity. It is one of the most quietly powerful moments in a book full of them.
The Writing Itself
There is no grandstanding in this prose. The Colonel trusts you to understand. He does not announce that service in Walong is punishing – he tells you that the road is prone to landslides and winter temperatures plunge to three degrees below zero, and he lets the landscape do the rest. He does not advertise his own courage or sacrifice. What he does do, repeatedly and beautifully, is pay attention. The weeping figs and chir pines along the Giabong trek. The coral reef fossils Dr Ritesh Arya discovered at Burtse – at 18,000 feet, at minus 35 degrees Celsius – proof that this frozen battlefield was once a warm ocean teeming with life. The mind’s eye is constantly ambushed by geological time.
The writing carries the mark of someone far more interested in the subject than in himself. In an era saturated with performative environmentalism and armchair expertise, this book offers something authentically different: knowledge earned through decades of presence. Colonel Lalotra has stood where he writes about. He has walked the trails, watched populations decline, witnessed development encroach. He has also seen resilience – otters returning, communities organising, ancient practices finding new life. These are not abstractions. They are what happened when he was there.
Verdict
India’s frontiers are not peripheral to who we are – they are definitional. They hold our oldest fossils and our most fragile ecosystems, our most marginalised communities and our most enduring cultural practices. They are where the idea of India is tested against actual terrain. Colonel Lalotra has spent a career on those frontiers, and in From Borderline to Byline, he has done something soldiers rarely do: he has turned his attention into prose, and his prose into an act of conservation.
This is a book to be read slowly, in the spirit in which it was written – with patience, with wonder, with a willingness to be changed by what you encounter. It will take you to places you have never been, and it will insist, quietly and persistently, that those places matter. That the Eurasian otter matters. That the Wakhi shepherdess matters. That the coral fossil at 18,000 feet matters. That everything we fail to notice, we will eventually lose.
Like the three otters that reappeared in the Kishan Ganga after two decades of absence, this book is proof that attention – sustained, disciplined, loving attention – is itself a form of preservation. Colonel Satish Singh Lalotra has given us not just a memoir of service, but a manifesto for seeing.
The post A manifesto of seeing appeared first on Daily Excelsior.