India’s venerable scholar-statesman-warrior, Jaswant Singh, recollects a telling incident in his biography, A Call to Honour: In Service of Emergent India: “An officer at Jhansi railway station, aping the mythical Brabazon to the flustered and hapless station master, after being informed that the train to Delhi had gone: ‘Gone’ the officer asked in a gimlet-soaked drawl, ‘what do you mean gone? Get another, instantly, go and get another train, now.’ Soon thereafter, he writes, ‘I realised soon enough that all this was empty posturing, this living as caricatures; that the Army had better awaken to reality.’ Not biting on the truth, the man of who had tired of saying ‘Yes Sir’ when he really meant ‘No Sir’, sought premature discharge, even though the pucca sahib graciously acknowledged, ‘what the Army gave me, taught me, left with me is my priceless pension.”
Many moons later, India’s armed forces would distinguish themselves with 1965, 1967, 1971, Kargil and many other known and unknown operations of valour, sacrifices and ‘unlimited liabilities’.