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| The Administrative Block, National Academy, Mussourie |
It was already dark and was well past seven in the
evening. There sitting at his desk was a frail elderly man, SAT Narayanan, the
Administrative Officer, working away on his files by a lamplight. A man of few
words, he shoved in-front of me some papers to sign and hollered for one Gainda
Lal who made his appearance soon enough and was asked to take me to Room No. 85
in the Happy Valley block. Narayanan bid me good bye after telling me that he
had given me a good room. (I later saw, true to his words, he had indeed given
me a good room. It had an extra window that not only overlooked the Happy
Valley but also let in some very welcome sun.)
________________
Retrieving my baggage from the taxi, Gainda Lal hauled
the pieces down a few flights of stairs to the room. Since that evening this
humble young man from the hills became my part-time butler serving as he did
eight probationers in four rooms. He would fetch me my bed-tea, polish my
shoes, make my bed, provide hot water for the bath, geysers then being
non-existent in the bathrooms, have my cottons washed and woollens ironed and
run other sundry errands whenever the occasion demanded. Mercifully, he was
around with me for only five months of the Course as in that short period he
almost spoilt me, as, I imagine, he would have others.
________________
Next morning, after breakfast, I happened to meet
Narayanan again and asked him if I could call on the Director. “Not necessary”,
he said and added that the Director was out there “under the greenwood tree”
and pointed towards the front lawn telling me to walk across. Sure enough a
clutch of young men were gathered under a big tree around a tall, hefty,
impressive looking man in a light-coloured suit pulling at his pipe. That was
Dr. AN Jha, the director of the then NAA. He was holding forth on something
which apparently was humorous as there was quite a bit of laughter. As I walked
over to the group Dr. Jha noticed me and asked me my name. As I told him my
surname he rattled off my full name “Proloy Kumar Bagchi”. He seemed to have
scanned the entire list of trainees – more than 250 of them – and remembered my
full name, an amazing feat of memory. He shook my hands and asked whether I was
from Agra. Agra had sent two Bagchis into the ICS, and, hence, perhaps the
question. I answered in the negative and told him I was from Gwalior. That was
my first and last meeting with the director.
__________________
During the first week all trainees were asked to take
lessons in musketry. We had to leg it down the kuccha pathways past the newly
established camp for the Tibetan refugees. I wasn’t an adventurous type and was
somewhat diffident about handling a gun. In any case, I thought it wouldn’t be
useful in any manner in the central services. When the man next to me screamed
with pain after the recoil from the .303 rifle and sat up holding his right
shoulder in great agony, I decided guns were not for me. That ended my musketry
training.
__________________
Lectures were mostly boring except, of course,
those rare ones delivered by the Director. He had a way with words and he could
make any subject interesting. Besides, his good humour held the attention of
his audience. The other person whose talks carry an impression with me till
today are the ones delivered by Swami Ranganathanada of the Rama Krishna
Mission. He delivered a series of, if I recall, four lectures and all were very
elevating. His fluency was remarkable, content captivating and English
impeccable.
I must make a mention of Prof. Ramaswami who used to
take the Economics classes. For those of us who were strangers to the subject
what he said in his deep bass flew over our heads. What I remember, as indeed
many of my colleagues would, is his lengthy discourses over numerous sessions
on the economic developmental model propounded by Walt Rostow which made no
sense to us having hardly any knowledge of economic models for growth. He
dilated at length on Rostovian concept of the “take off” stage of an economy.
The Indian economy was nowhere near it 50 years ago, limping along as it was
then at the “Hindu Rate of Growth” that was perhaps more than neutralised by
the predilection of our people to produce more children than goods and
services.
__________________
Although riding classes were compulsory for the IAS
probationers those of the Central Services could also join them. It was quite
an opportunity but I let it go, but my friend from the Customs & Excise
Service, Sukumar Mukhopadhyay, always keen to try new things, grasped it with
both hands.
One late afternoon I was hanging around with a few
friends in front of the Club House in the Happy Valley. At the far end of the
ground the riding instructor, Nawal Singh, was busy giving lessons. All of a
sudden, one of the horses just took off with the rider on its mount. Soon it
started galloping and turning 1800 it headed towards us. We
scampered away as it neared the Club House. Close to the Club suddenly it froze
in its tracks. Seconds later whatever happened was spectacular but could have
been really tragic. As the horse ‘braked’ and came to a dead-stop, this time it
was the rider who, in his khaki breeches and sola topee, took off from the
horseback and sailed over the horse’s head and taking a somersault in the air
landed on his back, mercifully, only inches away from a huge boulder. Seeing
him promptly assume the vertical position we were relieved that he was unhurt.
It was none other than Sukumar. Not quite broken, some newer horses in the
Academy in 1961, reportedly, still had a bit of their wild streak.
________________
Soon after the monsoons struck, and they strike the Himalayan foothills on which Mussourie is situated I fell sick. I told my room-mate to inform the PT instructor that I wouldn't be around as I was feeling unwell. Surprisingly, soon enough the instructor turned up armed with a thermometre. As the temperature was high the official car was requisitioned and I was sent to Kulrie around 4 miles away to the Academy physician. While a throat swab was sent to Dehra Dun, the doctor, as a measure of caution, suggested my hospitalisation for treatment against diphtheria. For me it happened to be St. Mary's Hospital up on the hills above the Mall where four well-built rickshaw-pullers hauled me up and deposited me there. It was empty - bereft of patients, most unlike hospitals in the plains. Clearly, it was off-season for the hill station. I was put in a beautiful well-lighted room but it smelt of DDT. The only physician on duty went through his chores and pumped twenty shots of painful Sodium Penicillin on my backside in the course 72 hours. He was a good soul, had lost his wife a few days before I turned up and had become a little spiritual. Despite the pain he administered to me I came to like him. The anti-climax happened on the third day when the report on the swab arrived saying it was not diphtheria, after all. But I had already gone through the pain and the back side was still sore.
___________________
The instructional tour took us to the then very
impressive Bhakra and Nangal dams which Nehru had described as temples of
modern India. We also visited Chandigarh and familiarised ourselves with the
concept of a planned city designed by the French architect, designer and
urbanist Le Corbusier. We were also taken to Delhi which coincided with the
Independence Day. We attended the ceremony at Red Fort, participated at the
reception given by the President Radhakrishnan. It was enriching to see all the
powerful and influential in person, including, inter alia, Nehru, Shastri,
Krishna Menon and the tall John Kenneth Galbraith, the then American
Ambassador, who sitting on a low sofa, seemingly, didn’t know what to do with
his extraordinarily long legs.
Most interesting for me, however, was the visit to
Nehru’s house where we had been taken to be addressed by the Prime Minister
himself. At the Teen Murthi we were herded into a massive hall that was
upstairs and was decorated with the gifts given to the PM by the visiting
foreign personages. A heavily-cushioned chair was kept near a window with a
mike in front. Obviously all of us were supposed to sit on the carpeted floor
around the sofa. I positioned myself alongside a wall next to a closed shiny
wooden door and stood there all the while. I think it was around 4.00 PM that I
heard a click of a bolt and, lo and behold, through the door emerged the Prime
Minister himself. He was in his churidar and kurta; without his Jawahar jacket,
or his trademark Gandhi cap. He had, presumably, had a snooze and was looking
fresh and glowing as also perky. Standing at the door he sized up the gathering
and muttered to himself in Hindi “arey, yahan to bara majma ikattha hua hai! (Quite a big gathering!)”
__________________
Those five months of the Foundation Course did change
me a lot. I may not have paid much attention to the lectures or may not have
learnt the ropes that would be useful to me in my later career but I certainly
changed. I tend to accept now what Dr. RK Trivedi, Sr. Dy. Director had once
told us. He had said that he had seen college boys coming through the portals
of the Academy and go out as officers. True to the hilt! There was a change in
my deportment as indeed it would have been in others. Coming out of a small
town, for the first time away from the protected environs of home, the change
in environment made a huge difference and so did the exposure to an elevated
intellectual ambiance as also to colleagues from all corners of the country.
Somebody had said at the end of the Course that it was a “long paid holiday”.
May be true, but during those five months whatever was directed at us had
somehow seeped in and kept working imperceptibly inside us through our long
official careers.
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