The Skull & Daggar SAGA – (Part 2)
By
Brig S K Thapa, Retd
Sometime later he happened to visit me at my bhangi colony room and seeing my frantic attempts to create some logo he pulled out his coloured pens and made a casual sketch of the skull …with a maroon beret… with horns …and a dagger in its teeth. However, for some reason (him being a civilian for one) he felt the Balidan flaming-dagger was more apt, and (since he had the pen) the badge is now erroneously slammed forever on the distinctive maroon beret. Further, us two brothers were quite unwilling to fully appreciate the SAS motto on the Winged dagger and that’s when he quipped that ‘Who-Cares-Who-Wins’ was as good for an outfit like ours rather than the Brits ‘Who-Dares-Wins’. And thus it has remained.
To make a short story long, soon after that the CO saw the birthday card on my table,- and before I realised it, it was quietly ‘confiscated’ and sent for printing as a sticker. Talk about a surgical strike! When the first batch of printed stickers arrived, the CO very politely handed one to my brother who stuck it on the bathroom mirror at our Shillong home where, I have reason to believe, it still sticks. Unfortunately with no one staying there all these many years, it will be difficult to see in what state it is now. Panks later tells me he had another piece on his Department of English cabinet at his college in Gangtok, but since the Sikkim sun shone on the said cabinet day in day out, the sticker had faded to a brilliant white. Sadly, the screen-printing process, considered State-of-the Art in those days, used to print the stickers had miserable lasting factor.
So finally, when the circular Skull & Dagger stickers did arrive, it fell into the eager hands of Beeru Yadav Sir with instructions to distribute them judiciously. This he promptly did, evident from the fact that I had wanted at least a dozen but could not get a single piece! Where the entire bump disappeared only Velu Saab will know !! Nor could we follow up on the issue as we got embroiled into the formation of NSG and also had to prepare for Op-Trident and Op-Pawan subsequently in quick succession. The next logical step (or perhaps not so logical) was to cast a 3D memento of the Skull & Dagger design. The idea of whether the ‘9’ should be a figure or in alphabets was hotly debated and finally in true army style, both options were executed and at present the ‘9’ exists both as a figure and in alphabets, depending on which year one is referring to.
The herculean task of converting a 2D image into a solid 3D memento must be credited to JDB Sir who single-mindedly pursued the project during his trips to Madras (“Chennai” had not beer coined yet). Done during the days before cell phones his achievement is commendable as he had to doubly strive for the memento…and a wife! The pic alongside shows the initial one (on the right) which was the first memento ever presented. It was made during the time when we were in the midst of kicking some serious LTTE ass.
That then, is the inception and the conceiving of the Skull Gang and its emblem. Now that I’m retired, the next time you see me I’ll probably have a tattoo of it where the sun don’t shine !
A few more collectibles that were made during the Silver Jubilee.
