The National Defence Academy - a lighthouse that beckons to many a bright-eyed youth today, blissfully unaware of the rocks that lurk under the waves.
The chaps in the Directorate of Recruitment (the marketing geniuses in uniform that they are) lob slogans like “Do you have it in you?” and suddenly teenage heads are filled with adventure, romance and dreams of derring-do. Good old-fashioned common sense packs its bags and catches a train to Nowhere-in-Particular.
I stumbled into the NDA, and thereby into the profession of arms, by what can only be described as a fortuitous fluke. My military destiny was set in motion by a classmate—an industrious chap spotted during lunch break one afternoon, hunched in a corner of the classroom, diligently scribbling away at a form. Upon enquiry it turned out to be the application for the entrance examination to the afore-mentioned NDA.
Having no grand career plans of my own, and a healthy fear of being left out of mysterious paperwork, I secured a copy for myself and sent it off. And, with all the deliberation of a man stepping into a muddy puddle while lost in the charms of his smartphone, I found myself appearing for the entrance exam to that fine institution, which, by the way, via a modest signboard along the road leading to it claimed its 8000 acres of hills and woods were a wildlife sanctuary.
As for the fauna that populate this wildlife sanctuary, the details were left politely unspecified. I can however confirm that not all were feathered, furred or scaled, nor walked on four legs!
Call it serendipity or clerical error. I somehow found myself selected. An outcome entirely baffling to me I assure you. Thus it came to be that on a warm summer day in June 1989, an anxious, apprehensive 18-year-old found himself reporting to the reception counter set up at Pune Railway Station for fresher cadets joining the NDA. A forbidding looking swarthy heavily moustached giant of a man in the olive-green uniform of the Indian Army presided over this desk. Add to these attributes a towering presence combined with a voice that suggested a regular diet of high quality iron nails, and it seemed to me that this man would need neither a dab of makeup nor an audition to stroll onto the sets of the TV serial 'Ramayan' that graced Doordarshan in those halcyon days for a role as 'Ravana'. I was soon to learn that this fearsome specimen was not unique. There were others with such menacing aesthetics at The NDA, and these were known as 'Drill Ustaads' (instructors). The ability to reduce young men to quivering wrecks with with their red sashes, whistles, canes and barked commands was a common talent that all of them possessed. I believe the US Army calls their counterparts - drill sergeants.This particular exemplar of that fearsome fraternity bore the name: Havildar Valmiki Yadav.
With time, my opinion of them was to change. Beneath that granite exterior lay hearts of 24-carat gold. These formidable gentlemen , it turned out, were fiercely proud of their noble calling: to take fresh-faced lads - some scarcely detached from their mothers’ apron strings - and transform them, through a mystifying blend of yelling, marching, and theatrical rage, into officers fit to lead one of the finest militaries on the Planet. It was a task, they performed with a sort of brutal affection, like blacksmiths who secretly adored the swords they forged in blazing furnaces and hammered into shape on anvils.
We first-termers were carted off to a place called the ‘NDA Wing', a sort of holding area where the first six months of training were to be endured at a place called Ghorpuri, a few kilometres shy of the NDA at Khadakwasla which was the real deal. The idea was to ease us into the rigours of Academy life. A sort of pre-heating before the roast. This was unlike the present day when cadets, presumably made of sterner stuff than we were proceed directly to the Khadakwasla campus.
The first ritual for a new entrant to the Armed Forces is always the haircut. One watched with incredulity and resignation as one's carefully cultivated and coiffeured 'civilian' locks of hair fell to the barber's scissors going snip-snip and shears which in no time at all turn one's head into an half-shorn coconut (I, alas, have never had anything more luxurious than a close cropped buzz-cut adorn my nut ever since).
And then, after a tea break - with snacks and mercifully free of shouting - we were informed, much to our surprise, that a Hindi movie would be screened that evening in the open-air theatre beside the drill square. This, we were told, was for “orientation purposes,” - though what precisely we were being oriented towards remained a mystery.
We were herded to the open-air theatre in a line - ‘raw’ civilians, still blissfully ignorant of how to march. Excited, homesick, and curious all at once, we chattered like schoolkids. The air fairly crackled with nervous energy - the sort you get when no one’s quite sure of where things are really headed for.
“So far, so good,” I told myself. Hot patties over evening tea, and now a movie show. If the NDA kept this up, I’d manage just fine. All those grim tales about how tough this place was must have been exaggerated. Alas, I was soon to realise that the ancient Greeks were spot on when they asserted that hubris precedes nemesis.
The movie, as it turned out, was a military flick titled Dahleez, starring Raj Babbar and Jackie Shroff. Dahleez is Hindi/Urdu for 'threshold'. It seems a rather pointy choice in retrospect. One couldn't help but wonder if its selection was symbolic, marking our own hesitant steps across the threshold into a world from which there would be no easy turning back.
And then, cutting through the hum of conversation, a voice suddenly boomed:
“Yeh cadet baatcheet kyon kar rahen hai?”
(Why are these cadets talking?)
It was Havildar Valmiki Yadav - his moustache acting as a bull-horn.
(“All of you, fall in on the drill square. Now!”)
That evening we learnt a lot. We learnt what ‘front-rolls’ meant, what ‘haunching’ was, what a ‘fireman’s lift’ involved - and how it felt to be bone-tired, sweaty, and grimy after two hours of all of the above on the drill square.
To this day, I couldn’t tell you what happens in the movie Dahleez after the opening credits.
As thresholds go, my real Dahleez wasn’t on the screen - it was the one marked with sweat stains on the drill square that evening!
