Sunbyanyname

This is not apocryphal. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the First, a pussy cat of one of the maids of the queen, on one of its unrestricted sojourns in the Windsor Castle, ran beneath the queen’s throne and startled the queen. The queen, having as good a sense of humour as many in my Facebook group called ‘Humour In And Out Of Humour’ or HIAOOU for short, decreed that the pussy cat be permitted to stay in the castle as long as it kept the castle free of mice.

And that’s how the pussy cat gained respectability and the famous nursery rhyme came about.

This 16th century tradition soon found its way to RN (Royal Naval) ships. And since we in the Indian Navy eagerly lapped up everything that the Brits had to offer, every IN ship had a cat of its own. Sailors on long sailings away from home comforted themselves with the company of a pussy cat, having left their wives ashore.

Pussy-cats also came in handy with the junior most sailors on board and the cabin boys or civilian bearers. Since these low-down worthies were kicked about by almost everyone on board, they now had the pussy-cat to kick; somewhat similar to how sailors in solitary detention (as a punishment) are given hemp to pick.

I was made the Ship’s Commander on the aircraft carrier Viraat in June 1994. The ship was under refit. But, within three months we got ready and by November of that year, we embarked the air squadrons.

During the refit, the living conditions had deteriorated. Sailors and officers were a few but rats and cats had increased their population. In order that the rats won’t attack all parts of their bodies whilst they slept, the sailors had encouraged cats to multiply. I don’t know how Noah had managed, but my sailors were convinced that the only way to manage the deluge (of rats) on board was to have pussies everywhere.

Now, this experiment was working very fine (for them, that is) until the aircraft came on board. And that’s the time I discovered, to my horror that one feline variety hated the other: the pussy-cats hated the White Tigers (Sea Harriers) and vice versa.

First imagine the change of scene as visualised by the pussy-cats. They were purring and meeowing without competition and everyone loved them. And then the White Tigers (successors of what my friend Sareshth Kumar Sir flew with blissful abandon) arrived on the scene and grred and howled. The only way to see things is to step down to the level of pussy-cats and feel how unfair life can be.

Now, shift the scene to the White Tigers; an unenviable track record of ruling the Indian seas since 1960. You are the pilot of one and you carry on your shoulders the proud legacy of having driven fear of God in the hearts of East Pakistanis in Cox Bazaar, Chittagong, and such equally exotic names as Mongla, Khulna and Chalna. And you are about to make a vertical landing on Viraat and find your spot already occupied by a pussy cat. I mean, you can be excused to conclude that this is not the right time and place for pussies.

So, it was left to the Ship’s Commander to have the Viraat flight deck as catless as possible. Many of you who have routinely dealt with pussies would tell me that nothing can be easier. All you have to do is to call the Master Chief Bosun’s Mate and tell him, “Master Chief Saab, starting tomorrow I don’t want to see pussy-cats on board.” And then Master Chief Saab smartly salutes and goes to mess-decks, musters all the pussy-cats in smart files and marches them off the gangway and tells them, “Bye, bye cats, please find yourself another home; Sea Tigers have come to live on board.”

There is a huge gap between fantasy and practice, however. Getting cats is easy; but getting rid of them has resulted into innumerable jokes and disasters. I had a job at hand. All leadership lessons that I had come across don’t ever teach you how to be DoP (Director of Pussies) on an aircraft carrier.

Sailors were emotionally involved with them. Their way of looking at it was that the pussy-cats stood by them in their hour of need; and to get rid of them at the expense of some White Tigers with doubtful capability to keep the mess decks clear of mice wasn’t a wise step at all.

Finally, tough measures were called for by yours truly. I counselled and cajoled, and coerced and shook them up that having Viraat cat-less was in national interest. I was also fed up of young pilots, during air briefings, greeting me with cat-calls. Indeed, they had told me that if I don’t do anything about it, they, the air boys, would have no choice but to boycatt – sorry – boycott me altogether.

The exercise took seven days. Away from the eyes of SPCA and Maneka Gandhi, cats were put into gunny bags and let out in the streets of Mumbai, to keep them mice free.

The original nursery rhymes from the days of Queen Bess went like this:

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?
I’ve been to London to look at the Queen.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you do there?
I frightened a little mouse, under the chair.

Nearly four centuries later, I was to realise that I was the “little mouse” as the Ship’s Commander. QE I was made of sterner stuff. I had come close to losing my job. And I was “frightened” indeed.

(Reliving a memory of nearly four decades ago)

JOM is a Junior Officers’ Mess on board ships. Sometimes, as was the case on Himgiri, there is more than one JOM: the Upper JOM for the senior amongst the junior officers and Lower JOM to indicate your status of being as low down in hierarchy as worms. Nevertheless, the middle word of the expansion of JOM, as far we were concerned, signified our having realized a life time aim, that of becoming a commissioned officer in the armed forces of our great nation. On board the Cadet Training Ship Delhi and Midshipman Training Ship Tir, we were as far away from becoming officers as Man was from landing on the Moon before Neil Armstrong actually did that small step for himself and giant leap for mankind. But, now we had arrived.

And, to give credit to the Navy, it treats you like officers too. During your watch at sea and in harbour, you have the charge, for example, of a modern Leander class frigate costing the nation – at that time – nearly a thousand crore rupees. Nothing moves on the ship without your permission. You are Captain of the frigate for the time being; empowered by the Regs Navy to be in command. Sailors, however senior they are, ask your permission to proceed ashore and you are responsible for them and everything that happens on board.

So, the last thing that you want is some senior one coming to you and bullshitting you about the way you live, similar to how they used to do in the Academy days checking your toothpaste caps etc.

One evening, however, we had an unexpected visitor to our Lower JOM: the Captain of the ship himself: Commander NN Anand or Baby Anand as he used to be called. We were lying on our bunks in various stages of dress and undress; mostly undress. Having the Captain standing in our midst was unimaginable. However, it was happening to us. We sprang out of the bunks somewhat similar to the goalies in the recently concluded World Cup during the shootouts. However, our Captain was determined to score one goal after another.

Since I was the tallest of the lot and most visible, he turned towards me and said, “Hey you, let me see your towel.”

The Navy trains its officers well. When they are faced with potentially dangerous situations, their minds don’t close like quick shut-down valves. I was the first one to seize the opportunity and the lone hanging towel in the JOM and claim it as my own. That left my other seven comrades towel-less. I had that gleeful look on my face that sometimes you see on the face of a Buzkashi contestant who seizes the buz (goat) and carry it to the goal.

However, this joy was short-lived since the next question was to Billoo, “And you, let me see your bed sheet.” And, I espied through the corner of my eyes that Billoo had grabbed the multi-coloured and multi-stained bed sheet that was nearest to him and claimed it as his own.

Baby Anand seemed to have come prepared to put us to shame. If we had thought that not having enough towels and bed-sheets between us was embarrassing, next he was asking such intimate questions as about the whereabouts of our pillows and pillow-covers, kerchiefs, and even under-wears and vests.

The great emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar when he was exiled to Burma wrote his famous ghazal there that had a line, “Do ghaz zameen naa mili kuye yaar mein.” Likewise, eight of us in Lower JOM (It had never appeared so ‘Low’ in our estimate earlier), didn’t find two yards of zameen to bury our mortification.

There is a Bombay Dyeing show room in Colaba opposite the mandir. All of us were sent there to the shop to buy clean bed-sheets, pillows, pillow covers, and towels; whereas another departmental store became richer by a few hundred bucks with eight young acting sub-lieutenants buying kerchiefs and underclothing.

The next afternoon, CO Beas Cdr Shivamani was a guest of our CO for lunch. One would think that the COs of ships when they meet over drinks and lunch have such important things to discuss as ship-handling and navigation and the international maritime situation. But, nay, discussing the hygiene and living style of their junior officers appear to be high in the agenda. And how do we know that? Well, the same evening, as we walked along Colaba Causeway, we found our course-mates led by Minhas, frantically purchasing towels, bed sheets and pillow covers at the Bombay Dyeing.

One good deed deserves another.

Two small explanations are required for the non-naval personnel to understand this anecdote:

First, what’s a Mids Board? Well, a Mid’s Board is a very detailed oral examination (viva) held at the end of one’s Midshipman tenure of about six months; a Midshipman is a rank between Cadet and a commissioned officer in the rank of Acting Sub-Lieutenant. Questions related to Bridgeman-ship, seamanship and all other aspects that one is trained on during one’s stint as Midshipman are normally asked.

Secondly, ships, submarines and other crafts at sea, at night and in low visibility exhibit various lights (normally Red for port or left, Green for Starboard or right, and white for main steaming lights on foremast and main mast and stern light. These lights are in accordance with International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 1972. These lights can be exhibited in varying brilliance (for range or distance at which they can be seen) and varying combination to indicate restrictions in movement that the vessel displaying them has. For example, two Red lights in a vertical line would indicate a vessel not under command.

Normally, the Mids Board has three members; the senior most being the President. The drift of the questions is naturally the prerogative of the President.

Each President has some favourite subject or the other. In our case Captain Sethi’s (an ace navigator) favourite was to grill the Mids (snotties; a mishipman is often referred to as Snotty since he is perpetually snivelling especially when a hard question is asked) on the subject of Lights and Shapes displayed by ships and craft.

Those who appeared on the first day returned to tell us that a certain Moore’s illustrated book on Lights was his favourite and he’d open the book at random and ask the snotty to describe the scenario depicted by a combination of lights; eg, two vessels engaged in RAS or Replenishment At Sea at night.

During the entire night we mugged up these scenarios. We were then seeing more lights than we had ever seen in our lives. Now, if only those scenarios would stay in our minds.

The Gunroom (Midshipmen are not allowed in the Wardroom for officers but they generally pass their spare time in the Gunroom; the name came about since revolvers and pistols belonging to the ship are generally kept in a locked and glasses cupboard so that they can be sighted during the rounds) was agog with all kinds of complicated questions regarding the Lights. We even made several jokes about these. For example, the answer to the question: ‘if you sight a Red Light to your left and Green Light to the right coming towards you, what do you make out of it? is: ‘It is merely a sea plane flying upside down’.

With this new knowledge gained on the night before the viva, some of us did very well. Others were as confused as snotties make it a point to be.

One of the latter variety was my friend PLG Manu. He went in with confidence to face the board. As he answered a few simple scenarios, he noticed that instead of gaining confidence he was losing the con thing in increasingly larger measures. It is because the qs were becoming tougher and tougher.

Finally, the Moore’s page depicted a curious combination of Red, Green, White, Yellow lights and for good effect a Blue light too added.

Captain Sethi asked him to unravel the mystery. Manu started blinking and also started seeing some invisible lights. He shook his head from side to side. But, Captain Sethi was insistent he should venture a guess.

Finally, Manu saw the light that Moses had seen on the Mount. And he blurted the answer that should have been clear to him all along,  “Sir, it is evident that a ship has rammed into a Disco”.

Generally, the best Midshipman is given the Sword of Honour (a sword is carried by officers in the Navy with their ceremonial uniforms). It was later learnt that they (the Board) had decided to give PLG the sword…….but, alas, not as an honour and at an unspecified place.

Like any other young man wanting to join the armed forces, I was mighty impressed with Netaji Subhash Chander Bose. Though not half as qualified as Nandu Chitnis of my Facebook group ‘Humour In And Out Of Uniform’ (HIAOOU) wherein Nandu has single-handedly destroyed all enemies within thousands of miles of India, Netaji could have really won us independence just as Nandu destroyed Karachi and won us war against Pakistan. Sadly for the bespectacled Subhash, HIAOOU had not yet been conceived and winning and destroying anything wasn’t as easy.

What connection do I have with NS? Only this that after finishing my bridge watch-keeping training on board Indian Naval Ship Himgiri, I was sent to Calcutta to bring a 400 tons LS HSD (Low Sulphur High Speed Diesel) tanker for Naval Dockyard Bombay, along with two other officers. One of them was the late DB Roy and the other was Sushil, the submariner, who retired as C-in-C South. This tanker was being built in a Yard in Calcutta and we had to accept it and sail it back to Bombay before the monsoons.

We were accommodated in an establishment called INS Netaji Subhash. It was a laid back no-hurry-to-do-anything type of establishment and as far from Netaji’s ‘Kadam kadam badaye ja khushi ke geet gaaye jaa’ as anyone can get. The establishment had decided that doing everything at snail’s pace was as good as reliving the memory of the great Netaji.

The Wardroom had some of the old relics that had been looted from the East Pakistan five years ago. One of the officers who was on permanent duty there told us that after these were displayed in the wardroom, these were re-looted by a number of officers who were appointed there as Mess Secretaries and PMCs; in exactly the manner paintings on the tanker Shakti that was built for the Indian Navy in a Yard in West Germany vanished after her first commission.

The Wardroom had other old relics too. These would be sitting on the bar stools in the wardroom between 7:30 to 10:30 PM every evening and prove that they could take all the three Xs from the Hercules rum bottles that they consumed and post these against their names, presence of mind and Netaji Subhash like qualities. The three of us too joined their august company in the evenings.

Sometimes, life was supposed to be infused into the rag-tag groups of officers that had assembled in Netaji Subhash for some vague purpose or the other. One of these was this All Calcutta Officers Navy Hockey Tournament that was held on the weekends in the month of April. First of all I was surprised to know that INS Netaji Subhash had so many outlying units attached to it that a tournament with that kind of lofty name could be held. Secondly, the three of us with a few other temporary duty officers were asked to form a team. And thirdly, since I was a lion-hearted (Singh) Punjabi, the others in our team took it for granted that I knew how to play hockey.

It took me very little time to learn the game. Even if the business end of my stick rarely touched the ball, it made not-so-inadvertent contact with the shins of quite a few of the other team players. We won the tournament – as the expression goes – by hook or simply by crook. It was decided that the rolling trophy would be presented to us in the month-end Captain’s Divisions the next day, that is, Friday.

That night our joining the old relics in the wardroom of INS Netaji Subhash was very sentimental. The old relics kept telling us how superbly we played. The opponents stealthily nursing their shins admitted that we had a unique technique not ever mastered by the likes of Dhyan Singh and others. To cut a long story short, several rounds in the name of the great Greek/Roman warrior Hercules were called for and some of us became sort of unfit to attend the next day morning Divisions. One of us – no names at this juncture  – was also supposed to be the Guard Commander.

These were special Divisions; ladies too were invited as spectators. Officers and ladies had started taking their seats under the awning whilst the Divisions assembled. And after the Parade Commander took his post, he screamed with all the lung power given to Bengalis that nearly won us independence, “Guard onder laayo” (March in the guard).

Our friend, the Guard Commander, not used to the meridian where Calcutta is situated, took it for granted that the guard will be called for at 7:55 AM, five minutes before the Colours, and had remembered to set up his alarm at 7 AM to pierce through his condition caused by the Greek warrior and bring him back to mother earth named after the Indian warrior. Little did he know that the proceedings at Netaji Subhash were an hour earlier.

Ten minutes before the guard was to march in, one of the Gunnery sailors had got the brainwave that the Guard Commander had not made his appearance (Gunners are very good at ‘brainwaves’ and had run up to the first floor of the building adjoining the Parade Ground (erstwhile battle ground of war named hockey tournament) to somehow get him to his feet).

The Parade Commander’s call of ‘Guard andar laayo’ at 6:55 AM coincided with his (Guard Commander’s) donning the tunic though still unbuttoned. In panic he ran to the veranda and screamed back, “Abhi laaya shrimaan” (Bringing the guard in, Sir). With this whilst still buttoning his tunic with one hand, holding his sword in the other, he ran down the veranda and steps and shouted his command from the first floor itself, “Guard baayen se tez chal” (Guard, quick march, by the left). The guard started marching, the drummer gave the marching beat, and the Guard Commander joined in just before the guard halted in front the saluting dais.

After the Parade was brought to vishraam (at-ease) by the Parade Commander, a GI (what will we do without them?) marched up to the Guard Commander, smartly saluted him and brought some semblance of uniformed service in the wantonly appearance of the Guard Commander in about 30 secs. These worthy gentlemen (GIs, that is) can change people’s appearance in less than a second when they want to; but that is another story!)

Finally, after the Commanding Officer Netaji Subhash took the salute, inspected the Guard and Divisions, proficiency awards were given to a few sailors and then the Hockey Rolling Trophy was presented to DB Roy.

As he marched (!) from the ranks of the ‘spare officers’ standing on the left of the dais facing the parade; I too had a Gunners style ‘brainwave’ and I understood why was it called a ‘rolling’ trophy. DBR rolled on to in front of the dais to receive it, almost rolled off when it was handed over to him and then rolled back to regain his position in the rank and file of ‘spare’ officers swaying in all possible directions.

Straightway after the Divisions, we rolled back into our rooms and decided to break all ties with Hercules; a historic decision that lasted with us for quite some time……..until the evening that is.