THE National Defence Academy at Khadakwasla in Pune is probably the only place in the world where if you are late for lunch or dinner, you get severely punished. It was lunchtime when I was there. And I had just inspected the NDA's kitchen, which is as long as a football field, before stepping out into the dining area, another football field running parallel. Young NDA cadets who will tomorrow become India's Army, Navy and Air Force officers, were getting outside of their daily rations with military precision.

I watched about 2,000 closely-cropped heads bury themselves into their plates as uniformed waiters went about serving the rice, dal, fried chicken and paneer masala which was that afternoon's menu. The cadets ate manfully, unmindful of my curious presence. They were not bothered, too, by the intrusion of my editor and photographer, Farzana Contractor, probably the only woman in several hundred acres of all-male territory. But I was not interested in the meal nor the dining hall with its two thousand diners. My attention was caught by a fascinating spectacle happening outside.

Several cadets in khakhis were being made to perform exercises and all sorts of physical contortions and manoeuvres for being late for lunch. I went out and watched them do push-ups and the frog leap. And squats, spot jogging, sprints, and even rolls on the blazing, hot ground. I might have tch, tch-ed in sympathy but for the presence of Major Alok Shankar, the catering officer at the NDA, a strict disciplinarian if ever I saw one. He stood watching over the cadets, one hard eye on his wristwatch, the other on the lunch that was happening in the dining hall.

I don't know if you are aware, but the NDA is India's premier defence institute. There are several entry points into the officer cadre of the defence forces, the NDA is one of them. The advantage of having the academy is that it catches boys who are young and in their formative years, and moulds them into the kind of persons the armed forces requires. Cadets go through three years of rigorous training here that is unlike regular college. In college, the main focus is academic training, and the goal is a BA, B.Com or B.Sc degree. At the NDA, the focus is all round development.

Apart from giving the cadets an academic foundation, the NDA also makes them physically and mentally strong. Most of all it develops in them the quality of character that goes into the making of a good leader. Thus the Army, Navy and Air Force are assured of men who will join the forces not wet behind the ears, but ready to be deputed to action stations if the need arises. In my opinion, the NDA can be considered the nursery of defence leadership in India. It invests a great deal of time, thought and resources so that the central purpose, which is character development, is not lost.

I was there at the invitation of Air Marshal Anil Kumar Trikha, AVSM, VSM, the Commandant at the NDA. The academy is on a hill in Khadakwasla, 600 metres above sea level, and a brisk 45 minute drive out of Pune city. It is vast, 9.5 km by 6.8 km, and spread out over 8,330 acres of verdant hillside. I am not sure, but I understand that the academy has some 83 km of roads in it. I travelled over some of these as I criss-crossed the place, a friendly microlight aircraft with trainee pilots buzzing overhead, and cadets cycling about their business in an orderly manner.

Outside of Lutyen's Delhi, I have not come across such finely ashpalted roads and well manicured lawns as the ones I saw at the NDA. The geniuses behind the academy are the architect, S. R. Balaporia, and the engineer, W. X. Mascarenhas, former principal of the Pune Engineering College. They got to work on October 16, 1949, which is when the NDA was founded, and got it ready for commission by January 16, 1955. Air Marshall Trikha and the Commandants before him, have kept the NDA looking like it was commissioned only yesterday. The academy's 14,820 population is made up largely of youngsters on their way to becoming commissioned officers in the defence forces. But it is men like the Commandant who make them puff their chests out with pride and stiffen their spines with the spit and polish of the services.

Air Marshall Trikha crushed my hand in a bone-shaking grip, huge muscles bulging out of his uniform, a steely look on his hard, smiling face. "Welcome to the NDA," he said. We were in his office. The same office Bollywood invaded and installed with Amitabh Bachchan when it was making Major Saab on the NDA with the superstar playing the commandant. Air Marshall Trikha took over the NDA in April last year and will be its Commandant for the next couple of years. He gets two types of visitors at the NDA. The VIPs, who include foreign dignitaries and Indian, government people, MPs, service chiefs and other honoured guests like our Sachin Tendulkar; and, school and college children who come to see how the academy functions with the idea of enrolling themselves later.

Once a month, on a Monday evening, the NDA has what it calls a guest dinner. The chief guest is usually a visiting or invited dignitary. And the Commandant presides over this dinner. The teaching staff of the academy sit with him and the VIP and they are joined by their wives. Also joining them at the guest dinner table is the champion squadron of the academy, which is made up of 60 of the NDA's finest cadets. Air Marshall Trikha said of the dinner, "I sometimes suggest a menu, but mainly restrict myself to approving what the catering officer sends up." When he entertains at home, which is frequently, the Commandant's wife does the cooking. "Or we get help from the academy," he said with a twinkle in his eye.

And help is indeed at hand. The NDA has five kitchens that are staffed with 55 cooks and 110 waiters. It also has six bakers and 35 maselchis who clean the dirty dishes. The central kitchen is used only on guest nights. The others are attached to the dining hall. The cooks are all civilian, but they have been trained at the Army Service Corps in Bangalore, and their repertoire is constantly updated by short courses the NDA organises for them at Pune's Le Meredien Hotel. Major Alok Shankar, the catering officer, has done a course with the Delhi Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology. Two army officers undergo training here every year for deputation into the NDA. "But this is a basic cooking course," he explained. "We only learn cooking. Not bakery, housekeeping and front office, that's for students joining the hotel industry." Because of his training, he can cook Indian, Chinese and Continental meals today!

The Cadets' Mess was commissioned with the rest of the NDA in 1955, and the first Monday night guest for dinner was Morarji Desai. There have been several dinners for visiting dignitaries after that and on the Burma teakwood walls of the dining hall, the menu cards of all these dinner have been framed and put up. I took a cursory look around. There was one for Queen Elizabeth that was done on November 21, 1983. The menu included consomme, smoked pomfret, chicken pompadour, mushroom and cheese souffle and mocha ice-cream. And one for Prime Minister Chou-en-lai of China on December 1, 1956, that had chicken and corn soup, tandoori chicken, fried rice, chingri macch and strawberry ice-cream.

The dining is fine at the NDA. When no effort is spared to make absolute men out of boys, you would hardly expect them to scrounge on food. This is the country's finest defence college, not your hill-station boarding school with its watery porridges and weak dals for meals! Breakfast, which is between 8.30 and 9.20 a.m., is eggs, cutlets, cornflakes or porridge, milk, toast and tea. Lunch, between 1.55 and 2.55 p.m., is either vegetarian or non-vegetarian, and once a week it is Chinese food. Dinner, from 8.30 to 9.25 p.m., is the same as lunch. Only twice a week it is Continental, and the cadets get a dessert every night. Apart from these meals in which the food is unlimited, the cadets are served tea in their squadrooms 11 in the morning and 5.45 in the evening. The food is got fresh from army supply depots by the NDA's storekeeper, who is called a quartermaster. The academy has its own butchery. And it also has a bakery in which bread, biscuits, cakes, puddings and sweets are made. These are all consumed by the cadets. Nothing goes on sale outside.

To conclude my visit there, Major Alok Shanker took me on a tour of the big kitchen. I was told that it was among the most modern in Asia. I don't think so. Among the biggest, certainly. All the equipment used is electrical and modern. They don't use any other cooking fuel at the NDA. The kitchen even has a high-powered stand-by generator waiting for an emergency. It has ovens for the breads, machines that deep-fry eggs four dozen at a time, an ice-cream making machine, enormous hotplates, dough-mixing machines, potato peelers, boilers for dals and curry items, automatic dishwashing machines, the works! Lunch was over when I was leaving but dinner preparations were already on. I stopped and breathed in freely of the aroma. Chinese food! Outside, the last of the straggling cadets was rolling in the grass for having missed lunch. And I wondered what sort of war-like activity in peace time was keeping these young boys away from the dining table every day at lunch.