As a teenager, I was spoilt and carefree. Being the youngest has its ups and downs in a large family — at times I felt that I was the last in line because there were so many people before me. But I was usually happy because I was well looked after by my mother, brothers and sister. Everyone around me gave me a lot of love and I was never short of anything.
Everything revolved around the family and we were very close-knit. In those days there was no television and little to do for entertainment. Besides, we couldn’t afford many things—just having a good meal was an achievement for us. We always ate together and shared everything. Even after my brothers left home, they would come back on leave for a month each year and we would be as close as ever—eating together, still sharing our food; only now we could afford more and better food and eat what we wanted to, rather than what we could afford.
I was spoiled at home and I was spoiled at school. I went to my mother’s primary school and, being a child of one of the teachers, the other children were scared of me and gave me respect that I had not really earned. To be honest, I received too much love and attention whilst I was growing up. Everything was made far too easy for me. I was lazy at school and not academically bright and when my mother put me into a good school I had to leave it because it was too much hard work and I couldn’t keep up.
For me, life was easy and I was carefree. In the summer holidays we would go to my uncle’s near Lucknow, where he had a farm and where I would play in the sugar cane fields with my cousins, most of whom are now scattered all over the world, in Australia, Canada, the United States and, of course, Great Britain.
I was far more interested in playing with friends than studying and had friend after friend. I wanted nothing but friends and became very popular. I got on with people and I enjoyed their company. As I got older, I enjoyed going to the movies with friends or travelling to their villages outside Patiala to hang around the fields doing nothing in particular— often when I should have been in school.
I didn’t like school. My aim was to find company and truancy became the order of the day. If we didn’t skip school, we would just sit at the back of the class during lessons and chat or play games. The classrooms themselves were huge and classes consisted of anything between 70 and 100 children. It was too easy to go unnoticed, though I can see now that I didn’t enjoy school because I made no effort to follow the teaching. You have to know what’s going on to enjoy something, and I didn’t have any idea what was going on. It’s the same as if you go to an event and the people sitting at the front can hear everything clearly so they’re enjoying it, but the people at the back are straining to hear, missing things and losing track. I sat at the back, chatted, played games and lost interest.
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.
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