Weak To 'Weaker'

Weak To Weaker

A week after setting foot in the cool confines of Wellington, I found myself with ten colleagues in the syndicate room, waiting to dazzle the Directing Staff (DS), the colonels who instruct us, with our performance in the IKT (Initial Knowledge Test). I had reached the Staff College the way most of us do, having survived a brutal entrance examination, and I carried the quiet certainty of a man who has been told, repeatedly and by competent authority, that he is the cream of the army. An initial knowledge test held no terror for cream. The DS, sensing perhaps that the cream was a shade over-confident, tried to settle our nerves by telling us not to take the IKT too seriously. It was a formality, nothing more. After all, we were the cream. Isn’t it?

At the appointed minute, H-hour for the cream, I began my attempt. I skipped the first page, which was mostly facts and figures; I had never been able to retain the width of a VSL or the span of a BLT, and saw no reason to start now. The later sections, I was certain, were mine. What followed instead was a long column of questions about which I knew nothing whatever. MES, station matters, the doings of other arms, and on it went. Before panic could establish a foothold, I recalled the DS and his counsel of calm. I relaxed, and ticked an answer against every question with the serene impartiality of a man who has no preference because he has no idea. I laid down my pen in a flat twenty minutes. Surveying the room, I found ten faces bent low over their papers, ticking and crossing and ticking again, and I wondered why grown officers were getting so ‘senti’ over something as trifling as the IKT. I sat back. Not idle, exactly, for there were chores to plan: recharging the Tata Sky, getting my wedding suit altered to ‘staff college standard’, the small administration of a man with time on his hands.

My reverie was cut short by the DS, who came to relieve me of my sheet and read it over. I watched, smug, as he settled into his chair. After a while he looked up and smiled at me. I returned the smile and began totting up the brownie points I had banked before we had so much as exchanged names. He asked, mildly, whether I would like to carry on. I said I would, in the affirmative. I packed up my briefcase, the brand-new ‘DSSC’ issue that marked me unmistakably as cream, took a last look round the room of strugglers, and walked out. The thirty-minute head start I put to good use, reaching the CSD well ahead of the pack and ransacking it at leisure. Chores done, I went home to a homely lunch and a thoroughly deserved siesta.

The IKT passed from memory into the general blur of the course. Then one morning, over a black coffee at Chanakya, I overheard the phrase ‘weak list’. I drifted across to investigate. A coursemate sat grieving; the college, it emerged, had taken the IKT scores and used them to sort a few unfortunates into a weak student list, an official register of the academically infirm. I offered the man my condolences. I may also have admonished him, gently, for stumbling at a hurdle as low as the IKT. One must, I felt, keep up standards. He took it well, all things considered.

A couple of quiet days followed. I was deep in the luxury of still being asleep at nine on a Saturday when the phone began to ring. I did the only sensible thing and ignored it. It rang on, with the persistence of bad news. At length I answered, to find my ‘weak’ coursemate on the line, instructing me to present myself at the syndicate room at once. I made him say it twice, and then a third time, before I could bring myself to accept that the message was meant for me. He rang off, but not before mentioning, with what I detected as some satisfaction, that the DS was waiting with open arms.

I do not recall the journey. For all I know I set a Staff College record from Gurkha Hill to Delta Division parking, the swiftest reluctant march in its history. The welcome on arrival was warm. The DS received me into the weak gang and proceeded to a thorough appreciation of my past ‘fauzi’ performance, my IKT, and our collective distinction as the unwanted cream of the 73rd Staff Course. The cream, it appeared, had curdled.

What the weak classes actually consisted of I shall carry to my grave with the dignity it deserves. I will say only that there is a particular flavour of humiliation reserved for a roomful of decorated field officers being walked, slowly and with great patience, through a thing a recruit learns in his first week. Our DS, a colonel of the old school, had a habit of removing his spectacles before delivering a verdict, as though the sight of us was best taken in soft focus. ‘This,’ he would say, polishing the lenses, ‘is fundamental.’ It always was. We had, between us, commanded men in places that do not appear on tourist maps. On a Saturday morning we could not, it seemed, be trusted with the fundamental.

We were released after two hours and ordered to present ourselves at 0900 each Saturday thereafter. Word travelled, as word does, and across the division we acquired the title of the ‘elite lot’. The following Saturday, ambling up in college formals, I crossed a party of ladies who fell to murmuring as I passed. I caught the words ‘weak classes’ in the murmur. Life went on. I consoled myself with intelligence from the grapevine: a fresh weak list, drawn after the first Revision Assignment (RE-1), would relieve the present incumbents. Liberation lay one examination away.

I resolved to acquit myself well in RE-1. I am pleased to record that I did. My definition of acquitting myself well parted ways, admittedly, with the Training Team’s, but a man must be allowed his own standards. The upshot was that I did not merely keep my place; I graduated, with full honours, to the post of most experienced member of Weak List-2. The promotion raised a few eyebrows. A colleague or two assumed a clerical error and said so. But the register held firm, and so did I. I had achieved what no other officer of the 73rd course could claim: selection to the weak list twice in succession. From ‘weak’ to ‘weaker’ in the space of a few weeks, and not a soul able to match it.

I now await the results of RE-2. My faith in the system remains total. Let them bring on Weak List-3; I am, after all, its natural candidate, and I would not wish to break a record I have worked so hard to set. Cheers.

Update. This morning I had my counselling with the SI, the Senior Instructor, a Brigadier who heads Delta Division and to whom all the DS, and all of us, ultimately answer. He had news. The weak list, he informed me, has been abolished. The whole apparatus, the register, the Saturday parade, the soft-focus fundamentals, gone, as though it had never existed. No more ignominy. I confess to a small, traitorous pang. I had been the last and the greatest name on a list that no longer exists, undisputed champion of a contest the authorities have quietly resolved never to hold again. There is, I find, no medal for that.

Sripada Sriram

L/No 554