Tapas Chakrabarti can be found on any given day in his office on the first floor of South City Mall, handling operations as its property manager. But he is a mall manager with a past.

The 6-ft tall, 52-year-old man with closely cropped hair and a booming voice was an armyman for 18 years and an NSG commando for three years. It’s been 13 years since he quit the army and it shows — he takes a dig at his pot belly with a twinkle in his eyes: “Now it’s impossible to run 5km but in those days, 5km used to be part of our PT, after which we would do rigorous exercises!” — but his heart remains on some distant battlefield. Major Chakrabarti allowed Metro a peek into the mind of the NSG commando…

An NSG commando is generally hand-picked by the commanding officer of a battalion once an individual volunteers to join. He is usually young, highly motivated, robust, capable of enduring great hardships with minimal requirements and retaining large amount of information. They can be officers or jawans.

The commanding officer keeps an eye out for people in his battalion who fit this profile and recommends them as NSG commandos in case the individual seconds it. Once the commando is chosen, he is sent for training.

The training for an NSG commando is intense, often running into months, with lessons on close-quarter-battle (CQB), use of CQB weapons, unarmed combat and jungle, desert, mountain and in-built area warfare techniques.

In India, a commando training school at Belgaum in Karnataka, the Jungle Warfare School at Vairengte (near Aizawl) and the High-Altitude Warfare School close to Gulmarg are popular training grounds. After being trained, an NSG commando is assigned his task. That is when his problems begin.

Many highly-trained NSG forces are sent as bodyguards for VIP protection. This is a waste of the rigorous training. The lack of regular activity, discipline and lightning action de-motivate the commando making him battle unfit.

The morale of the NSG commando goes down and often at close quarters with civilian officers, they feel demoralised because of the anomaly between the salary of a civil officer and an armyman and the lack of amenities and luxuries, often enjoyed by the former.

NSG commandos are victims of several lacunae — from lack of funds to administrative loopholes to inadequate transportation system to lack of co-ordination between territories and police.

There is no fast-track transport and this comes in the way of lightning action by an NSG commando. By the time NSG reached Mumbai from Delhi, 70 per cent of the damage had been done. If they had their own fast-track transport — choppers or aircraft — it would have taken an hour at the most. The actual reaction time — consisting of briefing and deploying — once they reach the action zone is no more than 30-45 minutes because it is all practised.

If anything like that were to happen in Calcutta, the NSG headquarters in Manesar, a village in Gurgaon district in Haryana, is the closest call.

The other major problem is the passage of information. There is poor co-ordination between territories and the police hardly have any exposure to the army or vice versa except at higher levels.

Being an NSG commando means you are a notch above the rest. In the air force, you can be a fighter pilot, helicopter pilot or a transport pilot and all categories are paid the same, more or less. But when you say you are a fighter pilot, it always draws the most attention.

An NSG commando receives similar admiration. But all that admiration comes to nothing if the system does everything it can to demoralise them.

(As told to Karo Christine Kumar)