Gp Capt Kapil Bhargava: Calling all Gnat Fiends

The way you are being addressed in this post is not an accident. AVM Ajit Lamba along with other recipients got a mail from me which was addressed to Dear Fiends. He promptly phoned to ask if this was intentional. It was then a Freudian Slip, though the idea was right. This time it is intended as all of us are almost fiendishly attached to the type.

My wife and I had come to Gurgaon on the way to attend a wedding in Rajasthan. I used the opportunity to get some lessons from my son Kishore whose idea and work it was to create this site. It has proved to be a proper repository for information on the Gnat and now includes photographs. Adequate control was ensured on the site to not make it a totally public blog. I needed lessons on how to manage it (not always successfully). The lessons this time were for learning how to upload pictures to the Photo Gallery of the site.

Please follow down to Photo Gallery. Under Gnat Vignettes, three sub-albums cover arrival etc, the sessions, and lunch. The other independent albums are for the Dinner at Le Meridien and the Reunion at ASTE. Since I cannot name many people in the pictures, the picture captions are neutral: a single title and a serial number. I wonder if I should add the photographs from the Brotherhood functions in Pune and include albums for pictures received from the UK and the HAL. In any case, these will have to wait till I am back home in Bangalore.

I request the Gnatties to identify the personalities etc and discuss any pictures they want with friends. But for this, please do not use the gnat-people email address. All of you Gnatties have the email address of each other. Using the already distributed directory, please keep the one-to-one exchanges between yourself and your contacts.

If anyone needs to make a large print of any picture, please ask me for its un-altered original file. These vary from, 1 MB to 4 MB each. For smaller prints or saving the picture on your hard disk simply right click on it and save the file on your own computer

In view of my plans for access to photographs in this manner, I had arranged with Mr Kapil Chandni that he should only produce a set of two DVDs for the live recording of the Vignettes session. Each set of two DVDs should cost about Rs 150 plus postage. We should hear soon about them and they should get distributed as planned by him. I now have little do with this process.

I do have one anecdote up my sleeve to be added to the site. But I wonder why the Gnat fiends have not added to them. It is your site and it should keep growing. Please have a look at Site Statistics – top right (third item) of the site itself. As of now, we have had 28479 visits from 7496 separate computer locations and 87 visits today. The visitor count below Photo Gallery was  started a bit late and will soon be removed.

The site has been a bit inactive though visitors keep coming to it each day. It is now up to all of you to add your Gnat tales to share and inform others around the world about our aircraft. Surely, we have not covered all that we know about the Gnat and Ajeet. Stories and information for these aircraft cannot have already dried up. Please exercise the grey matter and let us have the benefit of your experience and knowledge, even the funny bits that tickled you sometime in the hoary past.