The Breakfast Break
When God created the Universe and divided a day into 24 hours, never did he anticipate that the human brain would create an institution called the National Defence Academy, where human beings could do 24 hours’ worth of work in one hour.
A day starts in NDA anytime between dusk and dawn. The time a new day starts depends on:
- The term one is in
- The behavior of the junior termers on a particular day
- Their anticipated behavior in the coming days
- The mood of the senior termers – yesterday, today and tomorrow
- The attitude of the instructors
- The result of an inter Sqn Championship
- The Sqn Cdr’s happiness quotient
- Time of the year
- Global warming
It could be anything. For some unlucky ones, a day doesn’t end at all. The next one begins before the previous one ends.
In a day, activities are packed like sardines in a can. On paper, the academy is one of the most organized places where everything is supposed to stick to a strict schedule. But the actual USP of the academy is what happens outside the schedules. And these happen even beyond the knowledge of God who reduced a day to 24 hours.
The concentration business is not uniform along the 24 hours though. While there are periods of intense activity like the morning muster parade and a couple of hours leading to it, there are also comparatively very short durations of physical and mental inactivity like the four periods of academic classes after breakfast. But like in the Law of Averages, if a man is sleeping with his head on a block of ice and feet on burning coal, on the average he is considered comfortable, in NDA, the cadet is generally comfortable notwithstanding the periods of intense activity.
But of all those intense periods, the most intense is the breakfast break, the one hour supposedly meant for the cadets to have breakfast.
It happens after the first three periods of which two or all three could be outdoors meaning periods of drill, PT and Equitation. Lucky are the ones who have a single outdoor and the not so lucky ones may have drill for their third period.
Once the siren is sounded for the break, it sets forth a complicated series of activities. They are so dynamic that generally no two cadets are doing the same activity at one time. So here’s a sequence of activities an average cadet in junior terms goes through in this one hour.
Firstly, it is to get back to the squadron to have a bath, as no activity after breakfast can be undertaken without having a bath unless, one has a medical slip from thel hospital having excused taking bath. (Some smart cadets manage that too, though his sociability factor keeps going down in direct proportion to the number of days that he doesn’t take bath. But who cares?)
To reach the squadron, one has to be really wily and smart to beat the drill saabs and cadet appointments lying in wait in ambush, overcome the challenge of the cycle with a flat tyre, escape from the senior with a flat cycle ready to take away your fit cycle etc, etc, etc. Tougher the going, smarter the cadets get.
Having reached the squadron surmounting the seemingly insurmountable, one has to undergo a little extra practice in whatever field one is not good at.
So if you have not cleared the swimming test, you have to change into swimming costume, practice breast stroke in the corridor outside the CSM’s cabin or the Squadron office depending on the severity of your warning. It could also be PT or drill but never academics because there is not enough time for you to sit and read!
Having let off after cleaning the corridor by your breast stroke, while running to the cabin to change and take bath, you could be way jacked by a senior whose orderly is sick, to fix his uniform.
Do that and you manage to take a bath, change, come out and find a queue in front of a line of orderlies who would pull your shirt. This is an age old tradition of the academy where with the aim of not spoiling the crease of the starched KD shorts, the orderlies squat on the floor, puts their hands inside your shorts and pull the starched shirt to keep it taut. While doing so, some naughty, not so straight orderlies may extract some fun by trying to touch one’s ‘extremities’ and family jewels. Probably this drill was initiated by some smart orderly to have some fun.
The next activity is to sprint to the mess and crash in one’s chair where the crease would go for a six anyway. So one wonders why all that drama. But who cares?
Having done all this, now there is very little time left for breakfast, an event one had to undertake under very adverse circumstances and tremendous pressure.
While trying to have a morsel, one has to answer a quiz on any subject under the sky but mostly crazy ones about the academy itself (how many academy balls? what is the height of 2475? Etc,etc…), do a vault on an imaginary horse (the wooden one used for PT) with the right hand while eating with the left, do a double time ‘thum’ with left hand while eating with the right or having the infamous square meal even during breakfast.
After all this, if there’s any time left one can sprint back to the squadron, take the cycle if he is lucky to find it and no senior has taken it and manage to reach the classes in time without getting caught in another ambush, you have earned your rest during the next four periods.
Other add ons during the breakfast break:
- packing a senior’s breakfast if for some reasons he cannot come. Mostly the reason is his punishment by his senior. Hierarchy in services, you see.
- running errands for the senior which could be as bad as going to Gole Market which is out of bounds at this time for the cadets. Get caught and you are dead.
- reporting in one of the hundred ‘rigs’ the academy has devised, to someone outside one’s own squadron for a panga you took with a pal of his.
- stitching undefined number of buttons on a handkerchief because you are caught without one on your shirt.
- running around the Battalion block trying to beat the one minute deadline.
- history talks about a CSM who made those weak in cross country to run almost half the actual distance during breakfast break.
What a cadet is made to do and what he does in this one holy hour is beyond the wildest imaginations of the visionaries who formulated an Academy schedule and God Almighty who thought that 24 hours were adequate in a day.
So next time if someone tells you that you were made during breakfast break, you know what he means, don’t you??
