INDIANS – FASCINATION FOR FOREIGNERS EVEN IN HUMOUR IN THE ARMED FORCES

However big or small we are, whether in the armed forces or not, we have a fascination for foreigners, especially Americans (Read: ‘Is America The Perfect World That We Imagine?’). We Indians may be as far from the American way of life as we can get, but, if we have to give any really good example of humour in the armed forces, we turn to foreigners and especially the Yanks.

I have a group on humour in the Indian armed forces named ‘Humour In And Out Of Uniform’. Take this group for example. I don’t know whether an American Facebook group on Humour In Uniform has even a remote mention of anything Indian (unless it is to show us in a pejorative way) but, we relentlessly put up posts, cartoons, pictures, poems here that show their soldiers, sailors and airmen as the most sensitive fathers, exceedingly respected citizens, braves and perfect in every way; and of course very witty. I started the group nearly two years ago and I have yet to see an equivalent picture of excellent ‘humour’ in the Indian armed forces, of say, a jawan hugging his daughter whilst proceeding to battle the terrorists.

A rare cartoon by RK Laxman depicting the valour of the Indian Jawan
A rare cartoon by RK Laxman depicting the valour of the Indian Jawan

Our fascination takes another shape, ie, to think of their armed forces as supremely powerful and professional. Take this anecdote that has been put up here: ‘A US SEAL is being interviewed on the television. The anchor after observing that they have conducted operations in various countries comments, “So, then you must be knowing a number of foreign languages.” And the SEAL replies, “Ma’am, we don’t go there to talk.”’ Ah, what business-like approach!

Is it simply because we imagine the Americans to be what we ain’t? Or is it because cut and paste of American humour is easily available?

No, I don’t think so. When we had just joined the Navy, the Internet and cut-and-paste were not there. And yet we used to relate the apocryphal incident of our sea-going tug Hathi challenging the USS Enterprise on flashing light, “Which ship? Where bound?” and Enterprise responding with, “I am US Naval Ship Enterprise; and who are you?” When Hathi replied, “I am Indian Naval Ship Hathi”, Enterprise reportedly chuckled and flashed back, “Don’t be funny.” And we were amused to hear of the incident.

Our fascination for foreigners knows no bounds. It is another matter that the 1971 War’s East Pakistan operations by the Indian armed forces are being taught in the war colleges of the West as the finest examples of planning and conduct of war. But, we somehow imagine that the goras know and do things better.

A cartoon regarding Indian Navy's highly successful anti-piracy operations (Cartoon courtesy: toonwala.blogspot.com)
A cartoon regarding Indian Navy’s highly successful anti-piracy operations (Cartoon courtesy: toonwala.blogspot.com)

When I was commanding a missile vessel Vipul, the Local Flotilla was hosting three French ships visiting Mumbai under the command of ALINDIEN, a French naval acronym designing the admiral in charge of the maritime zone of the Indian Ocean, and of the French forces there. Besides other social interactions, it is customary to invite them to play games with our teams.

Now, we have divided games into what we call as troop games such as hockey, football, volleyball and even cricket. But, we do look at games like Golf, Squash-racquets and Lawn Tennis as purely officers’ sports. You don’t have golf courses, for example, in our services where jawans can play.

So, when we invited the French ships to play Golf, Lawn Tennis and Squash Racquets with us, we took it for granted that they would be sending their officers only. In the two venues: US Club Golf Course and IMSC we had arranged for our own officers to have high tea with them. Imagine our discomfiture when for all these “officer-oriented games”, sailors from the French ships landed up and played with our officers in those venues whereat our own sailors are never permitted.

Bending over backwards for the foreigners, including in HIAOOU, keeps our spines erect. I finally told the members of HIAOOU to keep up the good work; the best ten posts eulogizing the Americans and their humour would get free trips (all expenses paid) to the perfect world that we imagine.

Even after this, it is difficult to keep the Indians, ie, us, not to think of putting up posts concerning humour in the foreign armed forces but to concentrate on the Indian armed forces

Not many of our people realise that Google, arguably hand in glove with CIA to spy on foreigners including Indians (as revealed by Edward Snowden), has very little to offer on anything good about the Indian armed forces; if you want to see images of the impressive International Fleet Review conducted by the Indian Navy in 2001 in Mumbai, you would hardly see any pictures. However, if you Google mishap on INS Sindhuratna that eventually led to the Indian Navy Chief resigning, every little aspect of that mishap has been documented.

Cartoon depicting the IFR 2001 at Mumbai (Courtesy: www.amul.com)
Cartoon depicting the IFR 2001 at Mumbai (Courtesy: www.amul.com)

I am, however, determined to keep my group Humour In And Out Of Uniform reflecting the best of the humour in the Indian armed forces despite the carpet bombing by foreigner oriented members.

(courtesy: www.avinashtoon.blogspot.com)
(courtesy: www.avinashtoon.blogspot.com)

 

 

THE HUMOROUS SIDES OF WAR

If it hadn’t been for people dying and getting seriously injured, War would be really very funny. I mean, just think, dropping bombs, firing missiles, and chucking grenades at someone or at other people just because they feel differently.

Bringing 'democracy' to people through Arab Spring; but with tanks, bombs and guns (Pic courtesy: www.theguardian.com)
Bringing ‘democracy’ to people through Arab Spring; but with tanks, bombs and guns (Pic courtesy: www.theguardian.com)

“Wait a sec guys” you say with aplomb (since you are the mighty one), “Whilst we slam the daylights out of you for not recognizing that democracy is the best form of government. Next time be sure to vote for democracy so that you guys will be safe.”

The most ludicrous thing is that both the parties feel that they are fighting the Just War. In any case, each one of them knows, or at least used to know before social-media came in, that history can be re-written by the victorious.

Happy, smiling faces at Hiroshima in Oct 1945 after 'good sense' has been driven into them (Pic courtesy: www.mctv.ne.jp)
Happy, smiling faces at Hiroshima in Oct 1945 after ‘good sense’ has been driven into them (Pic courtesy: www.mctv.ne.jp)

I also feel that when two grownups fight the others call them loco. However, when countries fight, and spend money, resources, time, and lives plotting against each other, it is called stratagem or grand strategy or some equally high-sounding names. This is so that when Life goes on, the business of ending others’ lives should also flourish; a kind of ‘Live-and-Let-Die’.

In peacetime, people are busy doing or not doing what they feel like. However, as soon as War starts, everyone is busy doing War; soldiers with shooting down erstwhile friends-turned-enemies, doctors in stitching up mutilated bodies, industrialists (especially defence industrialists) making themselves richer than they normally do, undertakers in burying and cremating and writers in having enough to write about; eg, stories with a ‘human (ha, ha) angle’, tales of heroism, love, romance and intrigue; singers, movie-makers, actors, lyricists, music makers in churning out films and songs on how the soldiers stood between us and annihilation. Indeed, that’s the time you realize that War keeps more people busy than the bally peace!

We always remember the origin of such wars and its unique vocabulary. Thus, however advanced the means of war may become, in our folklore we shall always keep using the expression ‘chucking stones at each other’. However, newer expressions originate and Oxford and Webster and hordes of other dictionary wallahs run up to the printing presses to bring out the latest vocabulary unleashed by War.

Indians have convinced themselves that they were never war-minded. It is because we decided not to do so in the battlefield with the enemies of the country (even Mahabharata was between brothers, cousins and uncles); but on the roads (traffic wars of gaining just a few inches more than the ones to your right or left), streets and other public arena. Wars may have been important to people abroad, but, we manage to kill more people on the roads than they do with their war machinery, nerve gas, and even nuclear bombs. We too are capitalists and we too know how to remain in business.

An everyday scene in India (Pic courtesy: www.instablogs.com)
An everyday scene in India
(Pic courtesy: www.instablogs.com)

We are the most self-sufficient nation in the world; we have our own enemy within and are never dependent upon nefarious forces outside (or as Indira Gandhi used to call: “Foreign Hand”) to do it to us what we can do to ourselves.

Patton’s famous quote ‘The more you sweat in peace; the less you bleed in war’ has been taken by us rather seriously. So, we sweat and bleed in peacetime in our country, so that there will be nothing left to do in War.

Lastly, most of us in my group Humour In And Out Of Uniform (HIAOOU for short) are eternally grateful to War or its Fear since that’s the raison d’être for us as soldiers, airmen and sailors; in short, people in uniform. No War or its Fear, No ‘R, K, and Makaan’ for us and our families.

‘No War, No Uniform’ also means that HIAOOU ceases to be a greeting between us all; one of the stupidest collateral damages!

So, lets keep our powder dry,
And preserve our platitudes;
In uniform, we fight, we sail, we fly,
To correct the enemies’ attitudes.

There is glory and there is honour,
In rubbing their noses to ground;
It also gives HIAOOU its humour,
That couldn’t otherwise be found.

War, we love you and adore you,
Avoiding you, we call as ‘deterrence’,
Thankfully there is nothing new,
No other meaning or inference.

Than to advance the concept,
Of Poly Ticks by other means,
And, in fighting-for-peace become adept,
With bombs, missiles, bullets and magazines.

Charlie Chaplin in 'The Great Dictator'
Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Great Dictator’

HIAOUU there! Lets hear your views.

NAVY IN THE HILLS?

My father was posted in Shimla when I joined the Navy. It was a story of ‘From the Hills to the Sea’. During those days, as perhaps now too, no one in our parts of the world was very familiar with the Navy. The only Navy that they could think of was the merchant navy. But, that, anyone could go to sea in order to fight was as unbelievable to them as coming to the hills for anything other than to seek peace (remember the rishis and munis of ancient times?)

This is what Kandaghat looked like when I was small
This is what Kandaghat looked like when I was small

I was a square peg in a round hole and they used to wonder as to why a boy from the hills should go all the way south to join the Navy. I was awkward, didn’t know swimming, didn’t know how to switch on a television with its complicated controls such as vertical hold and horizontal hold, brightness, contrast etc. “Guy is a dumbo” was the verdict.

Gradually, I started being accepted in the Navy; I learnt how to switch on the telly, I learnt swimming and became as smart as the next guy; though not as clever.

Picture taken soon after I was commissioned in the Navy (01 Jul 1975), in Split, Yugoslavia during my first ship Himgiri's foreign cruise there.
Picture taken soon after I was commissioned in the Navy (01 Jul 1975), in Split, Yugoslavia during my first ship Himgiri’s foreign cruise there.

It was a damn good life and I enjoyed being at sea better than their thinking I was at sea in too many things that all the other guys from Bombay, Madras, Cochin, Calcutta and even Delhi were adept at.

Within three years of my being commissioned, my parents shifted to our present place Whispering Winds, Kandaghat and they continued being here until my father died of a jeep accident in 1984, just 9 kms away from our home.

I became a Navy man but, my heart continued being here in Kandaghat and I wrote an article about this on my blog (Read: ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is – Kandaghat in Shimla Hills’). On my Facebook Group ‘Humour In And Out Of Uniform’ I had put up an anecdote in which my father kept introducing me as an Army officer when immediately after my commissioning I visited my parents. It was very much here in Kandaghat.

If I was at sea in most subjects than any of my course mates, you should meet the Kandaghat people. Their total knowledge of the Navy could be written in the space behind a 5 paisa postage stamp.

Therefore, in the year 2006, when the Navy signal came about having a AFNHB (Air Force Naval Housing Board) colony in Kandaghat, of all the places, my phone never stopped ringing. Just about everyone known to me called to tell me that they had erred in their opinion of me and that I was the smartest of the entire lot who had managed to get a Navy housing colony made in my home place in the same manner as Indian Railway Ministers get a railway track made to their villages in Bihar, Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. One of them went to the extent of saying, “We thought of you as a total dumbo (aside: which we are sure you are), par tum to bahut pahunche hue nikale (but you are very clever indeed).”

Our house with its land is called 'Whispering Wind,s Kandaghat'. In the background the HIMUDA and AFNHB colony can be seen.
Our house with its land is called ‘Whispering Wind,s Kandaghat’. In the background the HIMUDA and AFNHB colony can be seen.

During my next leave I went about finding out how an Air Force Naval Housing Board colony happened to come up here in Kandaghat where there is no Air Force or Naval station anywhere close by. It is like having a snow skiing range in Rajasthan.

It came out that the Himachal government in a bid to decongest Shimla made a mini secretariat in Kandaghat, 32 kms from Shimla and made a HP Housing Board colony (HIMUDA – Himachal Urban Development Authority) here. Some land was available and they thought of giving it to the Army. The Army already had made a colony in Shoghi (halfway between Kandaghat and Shimla). They thought that accepting another colony within 15 kms of the first one would get them the tag of being a colonial power. Hence, even though it was rare for a service to share the largesse with the other services, they passed on the colony to the Navy and the Air Force (somewhat similar to how the Pakis ceded Aksai Chin to China). The Navy and the Air Force grabbed it with both hands, toes and knees.

This is what the colony looked like in 2011
This is what the colony looked like in 2011

I am on leave here for the nth time now. I just visited the local electricity office and met the Junior Engineer there about one of our power meters not working. “Which one, Sir?” he asked me, “The left one or the right one; or as you say Port one or the Starboard one?”

I visited the Daily Needs shop at the local Petrol Pump. The owner there knows me very well. He asked me, “How long are you anchored here now?”

I am now waiting for the traffic cop to give a ticket to an over-speeding car by telling its driver, “Can’t you see 30 Knots is the speed limit in the town?”

I joined the Navy 41 years ago from the hills; and now, the Navy has come to me in the hills. I remember this from Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist, “When you want a thing strongly, the elements conspire to make it possible.”

Now who says cows can’t fly?

 

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