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This piece is inspired by an article written by Rear Admiral SY Shrikhande in an earlier issue of Naval Despatch about the inordinate time spent on Command Divisions in a naval station and his efforts to affect a change in thinking change such that the same (or better) results could have been obtained in lesser time if we were not held hostage to the mechanical aspects of parades, forgetting the initial impulses and objectives of any evolution. I feel that Action Messing is a

In the Navy, the phrase ‘November November Three’ (NN 3) is (or more correctly was ‘in our times’) the code to signal the completion of a serial, an exercise, an evolution or a training session. Used in flag hoists or over radio circuits where brevity is important, it had become, over a period of time, shorthand in naval parlance to indicate the success of a mission, completion of a task or fulfilment of an objective. It is a typically understated way of saying that ‘the work

Folks, Today, 01 Jul 2025, as the Indian Navy commissioned INS Tamal in Kaliningrad, Russia, it marked a moment that held much resonance for me and, possibly, for many of my contemporaries. Named after the sword of Indra – the King of Gods – Tamal has the distinction of being India’s last ‘imported ship’. The stealth frigate is equipped with the latest and best in terms of weapons and sensors but it may be the last that the Baltic coast of Russia (or any other coast in any ot