Vice Adm Vennam Srinivas

He is the most senior person I have interviewed, and the only one who has been retired for less than a year. He commanded one of the Navy's three operational commands. He spent thirty years inside submarines. And when I asked him for the one story he would not want lost, he chose a sonar rating whose name he did not give me, and whose own crew had quietly written off as the weakest man on the watch.

They were deep, forty metres or more, patrolling off an adversary coast, and they had to come up to periscope depth at a particular moment for tactical reasons. Underwater, sound is the only thing that travels. A ship that is moving can be heard. A ship that is stopped cannot.

The rating on the sonar reported a contact directly above them, on their path, and told his captain not to come up. Nobody else in the compartment could hear anything at all.

They aborted. They moved forward. When he reported clear, they came up — and there was a vessel, stopped, not propelling, making no engine noise whatsoever. What it was doing was working a crane. That was the sound, and one man's ear had been sharp enough to catch it when nobody else's was.

What he took from it is not that he made a good call. It is the opposite. He describes it as the moment that taught him never to decide in advance whose input is worth having.

The rest of the conversation is what makes that story land. He described what a submarine actually is: a tube of metal narrower than a railway carriage, with no windows, tiered bunks, air that circulates and is scrubbed and only changed when you come up to run the diesels, no fried food because of the smoke, no smoking at all, not enough water to bathe, and the same faces for a month. Twenty-five to thirty days at a stretch on average. Two hundred to two hundred and fifty days a year at sea when you are operational.

He is precise about what that does to people. He says the psyche of a man inside a metal tube starts to be affected, that some become cranky, and that a commander has to handle each of them differently — and that you cannot see any of it from outside.

Which is the same point as the sonar story, arrived at from the other direction. On a submarine there are forty to a hundred people and nowhere to hide; on the destroyer he commanded there were four hundred and fifty and he could not meet them all.

He also corrected me, which I am glad about. I had asked how he went from hunting submarines to being hunted by them, having read that he specialised in anti-submarine warfare. He said it was the other way round: he volunteered for submarines in 1989, and the Navy then assigned him ASW — he had asked for navigation and did not get it. And then he took apart the premise of my question altogether.

The medium is on the submarine's side, he explained. They are always looking for us, and we know where they are.

He joined RIMC in 1977 as one of two boys selected from the southern states, in a batch of twenty-four. The other was Cadet Anil Joseph, from Kerala, who happened to be in the same railway compartment on the way up. They are still in touch every other day; they served together at Cochin in his last appointment; and Joseph's son went to the College too.