In a way, I was sorted, like a letter at the post office. There, the letters are sorted by area, whether Bromley, Sidcup, Reading, Slough or wherever. Similarly, in the classroom, the bright, industrious students will sit in the front row and pay attention to the teacher. The mediocre guys sit at the back. They don’t want to sit and study; they want to chat and play games. If they like chasing girls, they’re outside the girls’ school. If they like hanging around in bars, they’ll just go and sit in a bar. People get sorted according to their own desires and aspirations.

So I was sorted, just like that. I fell into bad company and became the most rebellious of my mother’s children. As teenagers, we would ride motorbikes out to my friends’ villages and hang around, again doing nothing. I would chase girls, get into fights and get up to no good. I was lucky not to get into trouble with the law because we sailed close to the wind at times.

I skipped two years of school because I was roaming around with friends rather than sitting in classes. Patiala was a large market town, a principality, and had everything a relatively modern city would have—a cinema, shops, bars, a station, colleges and a university. There were a lot of distractions and I completed my graduation from high school with a great deal of difficulty. I would just cram during the last month before an exam, scrape through, then spend the next nine months having a great time and playing around. Somehow I got through my exams and secured a place to do a one year pre-degree course at Mohindra College in Patiala in 1966.

I got through it, but still didn’t have a taste for learning. At the end of the pre-university year, I tried to follow my brothers and join the Indian Army. With five brothers in the armed forces, I already felt part of a military family and joining them seemed a natural thing to do. Besides this, the army was the quickest and simplest route out of poverty for people like us. We didn’t have the money to go to medical college or engineering college and study for six years for professional qualifications. The way I saw it, the army route was simple; you get selected, you get commissioned and then you’re an officer living on free rations with good perks and salaries. You just pray that war never takes place—and 99 per cent of the time it doesn’t with the Indian Army—and you enjoy a good life.

However, I was rejected. I tried twice as a teenager and was rejected both times. I was so disappointed then, but now I understand that this was the best thing to happen to me. My brothers were always on the move and sometimes they were on the battlefield. Their life was actually much harder than I imagined it when I was young—and when they finished their 20-year commissions they were back to square one, building a new life, whilst I had moved beyond them. So I have no regrets.

Needless to say, I’m proud of my brothers for what they achieved as soldiers. They build good careers and were very successful. They took courses and learned to maintain their self-discipline. They all rose to the rank of colonel in time and, en route, learned skills that set them apart from regular officers. For example, one became a German interpreter for the Army and later taught English to German students in Germany. Another became a Russian interpreter for the Indian Air Force. They were all exceptional in their own way. In the next generation, my sister’s son also went into the Army and her daughter married to a colonel. We became an army family. There was something in us as a family that made us all want to be better than the guy next door. There was sibling rivalry to be better than each other but this forced us all to go the extra mile.