THE POINT OF THE EXERCISE

My career as a horseman has been very short indeed. Back at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), in Mussoorie, I opted for riding instead of the more humdrum PT.

- Anirban Mukhopadhaya

After all, being on a horse was not without its glamour and far surpassed the tedium of morning PT exercises in the cold, wet grass of the Academy's central lawn, or so I thought.

Hazari Singhji, our riding instructor, was a much-tried man. Seeing us raw recruits make a mess of it atop his beloved horses shook him to his emotional core. He firmly held to his conviction, however, that if you finish a sentence with the word 'sir', you have given the specimen seated on the noble Army mount (sent to us by the Army's training college at Dehradun), necessary respect, or as much as he deserved anyway. Coupled with the dark rumours that the Army had sent us their wildest horses (in the hope that one of us pernicious 'civilians' would fall off a horse's back, or so the cynics said), riding represented a dual challenge. On the one hand you had a bucking horse, quite out of the novice rider's control, while that unfortunate could hear Hazari Singh scream, "Who is that ass on the horse-sir?" I understood early why riding was meant to be character-building; it could very quickly strip you of any false sense of ego that you might have ever had.