Fight To The Finish

A centenarian looks back at life on the frontlines and regales Prakash Bhandari with tales from a distinguished career.

Lt Col Ram Singh has a rather bold prescription for a long and healthy life—two pegs of whisky at sundown. As he pours a stiff Scotch into a cut-glass tumbler waiting patiently on a wooden side table, the former soldier dusts off his favourite memories and settles down to an evening of reminiscing. These days, he has plenty to toast, having celebrated his 100 th year this April.

There’s another reason for his good cheer—it’s the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Al Alamein, which marked the culmination of the World War II’s North African campaign between the British and the German- Italian army. And our soldier was at centre-field, right where the action took place.

Seated in the drawing room in his son’s bungalow at Veer Vihar in Jaipur, Ram Singh points out that being a Rajput, valour runs in his blood. The son of a landlord, he was raised in Udaipur and like every other Rajput lad, he too dreamt of becoming an army officer one day.

These were times when the princely states in pre-Independent India maintained their own forces or ‘state forces’, which were largely ceremonial in nature. As a subject of the Mewar royalty, Ram Singh was expected to join the Mewar state forces but he dearly wanted to join the British Indian Army. “I wanted to join the regular British Indian Army because the scope of promotions was better and, as it was a regular army, the salary was better than in the state forces,” he shares.

In 1935, Ram Singh went to Dehradun to train as an officer of the Indian Army. When the ruler of Mewar Maharana Bhupal Singh learnt of this, he ordered the young soldier to return. Left with no choice, Ram Singh came back to Udaipur and became an officer of the Mewar state forces. He was commissioned in 1938.