Quis custodiet ipsoscustodes ?

Recently I have shifted my home to Gurgaon, a satellite city close to the capital. The place is nice and has some problems of absence of public transport system. When I arrived at Gurgaon, we stayed at a company guest house which is in sector 14. A place called Defence Colony is very close by. Myself with other new joinees would go for evening walks across the colony and marvel at the houses, estimating their values and calculating the number of years it would take to own such a house. (Of course the number of years was more than the average life expectancy at birth in India which is around 65 years and therefore beyond our reach). Looking at those houses I pondered over choice of career. Monetary benefits has been the sole guiding principle for my career choice and for this reason I had opted for a engineering. But now as I stood before those huge monuments of sucess I wondered whether the decision was right. I wondered where I went wrong. As far as I knew, the army officers are paid a pittiance, and that's why only three groups of people choose to join the army:

1. People who want to do something for their country.
2. People who have to maintain a family legacy.
3. People who have no where else to go.

Still I wondered where does all the money come from. There have been cases of ketchup colonel and coffin scam within the army, but with so many bunglows around I kept wondering where all the money comes from there. Then one day a friend of mine made the disclosure of the unaccounted wealth. The process of recruitment in the officer cadre is very strict but the soldiers are taken through recruitment drives conducted by the army. Also the criteria for recruitment in case of soldiers is not very clearly defined. Now, this loophole is used by our 'respectable' officers for minting money. Bringing in their discretion, they charge 1-2 lakh upwards for every soldier recruited.
On hearing his narration about the bravery and integrity levels in the army, my respect for the uniform has vanished in thin air. Whenever I cross those streets lined with sprawling bunglows, I remeber the question posed by Dan Brown in his novel Digital Fortress "Who will guard the guards?"