Major (Retd) Bhuwani Pandhak of 7th Gurkha Rifles, arrived in Hong Kong as a young Gurkha at the age of 18 in 1979 and still has lots of love for the city where he served until mid '90s. During his service in Hong Kong, he and his comrades were based in Cassino, Burma and Gallipoli Lines. Their primary roles included border patrol protecting between Hong Kong and China from the illegal immigrants as well as to manage internal conflict. And at those times they too had operations around the globe. But he remembers how happy he felt returning back to Hong Kong after every operations and services around the world. Actually while he returning back to Hong Kong, he felt like returning home, not only because it was in Asia but also
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Sgt. Kulman Tamang from The 10th Princess Mary’s Own Gurkha Rifles was recruited in 1956, when he was 18. When he was young, his father actually wanted him to study with some learned man in the village. But he had a passion for music. Despite his passion for music, his father sent him to the mountains to study Buddhism while he was around 12 or 13 years of age, where he could not focus on that. And later he found himself unfit there, so he decided to leave. "But how can I return home?", he asked himself thinking it will not be easy to face his people at home. And on the way back home thinking about it, he saw other young people going for recruitment One of my common questions while I meet Gurkha veterans is, how old were they when they were recruited, and when I know their age of recruitment, it not only surprises me but also makes me wonder what and how did they feel when being away from their family at such a young age? But as I keep on talking to them and I know more about them, I find they have always been happy and proud of being the army from young and learning so many things and they were later able to use that knowledge and also contribute to society when needed. Likewise sapper Dhir Bahadhur Gurung of Queen's Gurkha Engineers was recruited at the young age...
Many of you might have seen him around Hong Kong or maybe in this particular restaurant in Yuen Long; but I wonder how many of you really know him or have really noticed the walls in his restaurant and have been curious to know more about him. Well then & now, he still carries that cheerful smile and runs his famous restaurant Sek Kong Gaa Lei Nguk 石崗咖喱屋 or Shaffi's Restaurant in Yuen Long. But he is not Shaffi. He is... Colonel Christopher Peter Lavender joined the British army in 1968 when was 18. However he was not with the Gurkhas initially, but he was with the 4th Royal Tank Regiment until 1978 instead. Only having known little about Gurkhas, at first he thought he couldn’t join them and thought it was an elite and rarified organization. But he heard a lot about Gurkhas when he was in the service, and even got to know and learn more about Gurkhas from the other Brigade of Gurkha Officers when he was doing a course in England. Living away from family and having already served in Germany and Northern Ireland, he was already thinking of leaving the force, but the Officers persuaded him to transfer, so he applied for the secondment to Brigade of Gurkhas in 1978. After the secondment, when he was asked whether he is interested to be a permanent cadre of Brigade of Gurkhas, |
Gurung Dhiraj- Grandson of a Gurkha trying to learn and share the history of Gurkhas in Hong Kong. Archives
June 2018
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