Nawab Saab

by Yawar Baig | Dec 24, 2019 | See with your Heart | 2 comments

It was 1968 and I was 13 years old, in Grade (we called it Class) 8 in the Hyderabad Public School. If you left the school from its main gate and walked over the bridge across the stream which flowed full and freely in those days (not the trickle of sewage and toxic chemicals today) and on which we used to sometimes canoe, you came to the Begumpet Railway Station. This was at the bottom of the garden of a very graceful British Country Mansion, except that it was in Begumpet and not in England. Be that as it may, it would have been totally at home in the Shires of England. It was called Vilayat Manzil. It had a huge wooden gate about 8 feet tall and wide enough to take a Four-in-hand or perhaps an elephant or two. Not surprising as this was the house of Nawab Wali ud Dowla, the Prime Minister of Hyderabad State. The son of the man who built Falaknuma Palace, Nawab Vicar ul Mulk, who was also a Prime Minister of Hyderabad State in his time. That is where Nawab Nazir Yar Jung Bahadur , son of Nawab Wali ud Dowla, lived . By the time I met him, his father had passed away (he died in Madina in 1935) but his mother (Ameerunnisa Begum) and younger brother, Nawab Bashir Yar Jung lived in Vilayat Manzil. His older brother, Nawab Habib Jung, also a good friend, lived nearby in his own house, built in another part of the garden that surrounded Vilayat Manzil. A beautiful Spanish style Hacienda with an open central courtyard. Nawab Habib Jung Bahadur wrote the very first reference letter for me when I had applied to Harrisons & Crossfield Limited (Harrisons Malayalam) in 1979. I recall two things in it. He wrote, “He is excellent in saddle seat equitation and always shows respect where respect is due.” Habib Jung had horses and I used to ride them with his son Mohammed and he fine-tuned both our riding style.

As you came through the gate, you were on a circular driveway which curved past two large water tanks with marble fountains with carved lions. Even then water was getting scarce and so I never saw those fountains functioning, but the sculptures were striking. This is where I met Nawab Nazir Yar Jung first. I had heard of him as a dog breeder, trainer and judge. He was a prominent member of the Kennel Club of India (KCI) and a highly respected judge in dogs shows all over the world. I had the privilege of accompanying him to several dog shows and can still see him racing around the ring with his German Shepherds or in the field trails of his Labradors. I was very keen on owning one of the dogs from his kennel, the famous Paigah Kennels but to my great surprise and disappointment the price was Rs. 500 for a puppy. In 1968 that was more money that I could have dreamt of. So, I never bought a puppy. Nawab Saab however, took a liking to me and allowed me to spend time with him in caring for his dogs. This rather unlikely friendship grew, and in time he treated me like his own son. At that time, he used to have more than one hundred dogs in his kennels. It was a sight to see. I didn’t get a puppy at that time (later I got several) but I got the friendship of Nawab Saab, which was a priceless gift. He became my mentor, teacher and father figure.

My keenness for tea planting also came from listening to stories of plantations – the Anamallais in particular from Nawab Nazir Yar Jung. Nawab Saab had been a planter with Brooke Bond Tea Company (Tea Estates India) and was on Monica Estate (SenguthaparaiDivision).

Another very dear friend and mentor, Mr. K. Ahmedullah wrote this piece about Nawab Nazir Yar Jung which gives an insight into his planting life, which he never mentioned in the more than 50 years of our friendship. He talked about his hunting in Grass Hills and Highwavys, the exploits of his dogs and about his tracker friend called Kali, who he mentioned with great affection. But he never mentioned anything about his planting career. Being a planter myself, I can appreciate what Mr. Ahmedullah writes. Here it is:

NYJ was an authority on dog breeding, training, and was often a judge of international dog shows. It is a pity that this was not mentioned in the item that carried the news of his passing away. The news only harped on his Paigah connection, Jung title and so on. NYJ was on Monica Estate, Anamallais, reporting to Raghava Menon, just before he quit planting. As you know, Monica was a prestige posting, being the flag ship Estate of M/s Tea Estates of India, of Brooke Bond. 

It so happened that I was moved to Monica as assistant manager, immediately after NYJ resigned. Soon thereafter Raghava Menon was promoted as Group Manager in addition to his holding charge of Monica. He continued to reside in Monica Estate. I was asked to look after the operations of the entire estate to allow Raghava Menon to look after his additional duty, but I remained an assistant manager! That is when I took charge of Senguthaparai, which was looked after by NYJ.

And that is when I discovered that NYJ had planted the most advanced 100 hectares of coffee selections from Kenya. Not only that but he had created a most advanced system of curing and pulping the coffee harvest, using gravity as the driving force, from a stream which flowed on Senguthaparai. That coffee commanded a premium at the Auctions. 

I thought I should put this on record as not many are aware of the talents this man had.  NYJ was a decent, pious man, who never harmed anyone. IN FACT HIS GENEROSITY IS A LEGEND ON THE PLANTATIONS WHERE HE WORKED. He died with the KALEMA on his lips, which is the best possible reward The Almighty bestows on those who walk in HIS WAY . 

Some asides:

NYJ never entered the Anamallais Club! Siasp Kothavala, Doon School contact, was his close friend and just a few others, whom he entertained lavishly. He had about 20 dogs and a donkey, which was used to carry meat daily from Valparai town for his dogs! 

I got all this information from Raghava Menon, who had a high opinion of NYJ and from Siasp and his wife Zarine , who were good friends of ours.

Like most of my friends at that time, Nawab Saab was about twenty years my senior. I think I benefited a great deal from being friends with older people as I learnt from their experience and my equation was always as a learner and they had something to teach. Nawab Saab was an exception in that he had a variety of life experience that I have seldom found anywhere. He would not only tell stories but would draw lessons from them which I found very useful and applied in my life many years later. He was a Judo Brown belt, a pilot in the Royal Air Force, polo player and dressage expert, a crack shot with a rifle and shotgun, a woodsman who taught me to love the forest and how to take care of myself in it. He was a swimmer trained as a lifeguard. He was a planter, manager and a role model par excellence.

The thing I remember about Nawab Nazir Yar Jung above all else is his storytelling. Storytelling is an art. Not everyone can tell a good story. Nawab Saab was a master of this art. Listening to him I remember being transported to the misty slopes of Grass Hills, waiting in the cold of the dawn for the Nilgiri Thar to present the opportunity for a good shot as they came out on the crags to take the sun. I recalled these descriptions when I went to Grass Hills more than 25 years after him and felt that I had been there before. So vivid and detailed were his descriptions.

I remember feeling a hollow dropping sensation in the pit of my stomach as I listened to him tell the story about how he was charged by a wounded Bison (Gaur) and how his Airedale Terrier saved the day by drawing the animal away towards it, allowing Nawab Saab to get the killing shot. But the dog, whose name was Khan, went over the cliff with the bison and died. Nawab Saab would have tears in his eyes when he told this story. I remember all the tips he gave me about survival in the jungles and about woodcraft, all of which I have tried and found to be superb. Every tip he gave me, be it about planting, or hunting, or safety or human psychology, was true.

The key to a good story is detail. Detail is what fills color into the outline. Detail is what helps you to see what the storyteller has seen. I can vouch for the fact that I could see the mist rise from the forest in the dawn as the sun rose. I could smell the rank smell of elephant urine which announces their presence in the forest. I could hear the rumblings of their stomachs and the low deep hum by which they communicate. And many years later when I had the privilege to walk in the same path that Nawab Nazir Yar Jung walked, I knew that I had been there before. I had walked those paths in spirit, listening to the narrative of a master storyteller and today I walked them myself and found the story to be true in every respect. I knew the smells, the sights and the feelings. Nawab Saab walked in spirit beside me and it felt good to know that.

Nawab Nazir Yar Jung was an international expert on dogs and was invited to judge dog shows around the world. With him, I learned to train dogs for various activities, from tracking to retrieving to guarding. Dogs are amazing creatures. One must live with them and train them to know this. I spent many years right through school and college doing this. Nawab Saab was at that time training a dog squad for Thengakal Estate in Vandiperiyar, Kerala, which had perennial problems with theft. More about that later. I worked with him training Dobermans, German Shepherds, and Labradors for tracking and guard/attack work. Nawab Saab was a strict disciplinarian and didn’t allow even his own cousin who was on our team to call him anything other than Sir or Nawab Saab. He disliked people calling him ‘Uncle’. He used to say, ‘I have nephews and don’t need any more. You can call me Nawab Saab or Sir.’ This, however, didn’t reduce the warmth and friendship with which he treated us. We would start very early in the morning and work right through the day till it got very hot. Then we would stand down and give the dogs a bath and feed them and we would all rest. Then in the night, once it got dark, we would start the training once again.

From Nawab Nazir Yar Jung, I learnt the importance of commitment to quality. He never once used the word, but he never accepted anything but the best. Be it in breeding dogs or in their training, or in training horses. Attention to detail and insisting on the best. He was an expert in Judo and that also added to the quality of what he taught us. He taught us many self-defense techniques using our bare hands or ordinary objects of everyday use that are always at hand and can be converted into weapons to defend yourself and make the attacker think twice about attacking you. Martial arts training is more about training the mind than about the body. Martial arts is about living with awareness, studying your opponent, discovering his weakness, and exploiting it to your advantage. It is also about building your opponent a bridge of gold to retreat over – as Sun-Tzu calls it. But to do that you have to conquer your ego before conquering your enemy. The worst enemy is an overindulged ego.

In the years that I spent with Nawab Saab I learnt that when you work with animals your own sensitivity and communication improves. Your language is useless as the animal is only responding to sound, facial expression and signal. So the importance of being absolutely precise not only in what you say, but in how you say it and being aware of your body language when you are giving that command are essential to get the instant obedience that only a dog can give you. Dogs are so incredibly sensitive that they will pick up your facial expression or the way you hold your hand when you give a command. And the next time you don’t give it in that exact way, the animal gets confused. It is always essential to be extremely self-aware to be a good trainer. I realized that training dogs was equally if not more about training myself in how to communicate effectively. It was hands-on experiential learning in being intensely aware of myself, my posture, facial expression, tone of voice, mood, and overall disposition. I learnt all this training dogs, but over the decades since then this helped me in communication, public speaking, negotiating, and coaching people across three continents. I thank Nawab Nazir Yar Jung for teaching me these lessons and I know that he was pleased with me.

Dogs anticipate you to such an extent that to see a highly trained dog and his handler at work is to witness magic. That is what we saw when we saw Nawab Saab working with his dogs. The dog seemed to be doing everything on its own whereas he was doing nothing without his handler’s command. But the commands are so subtle that they are invisible to all but the trained eye that knows what to look for. There is a wonderful program on British Television which shows sheepdog trials. You see this handler standing a long way off in the field directing his Border Collie (the favorite breed for these trails) entirely by hand signals. The dog goes to the flock, cuts out precisely the number of sheep that he is ordered to cut out, and drives them into the pen all on its own by responding to signals that are invisible to us.

We had for our own trainer, the best in the world. A man who had trained everything from sheep dogs to tracking dogs, gun dogs, hunting dogs, and guard dogs. And we learnt from him. I hope we learnt well. To test how well we had trained the dogs to track, we would stand on one side of a wall that bordered a large area of scrub vegetation. Then we would give our dog a ball which he would hold in his mouth and smell. Then we would command him to sit and stay and throw the ball as far as we could over the wall into the forest. The dog would vibrate with excitement, yearning to go for the ball. We would count to ten and then say, “Get!” And off he would go. A big Doberman would clear a six-foot wall without so much as touching it. A Labrador would scramble over it. And then a few minutes later, back it would come over the wall with the ball in its mouth, circle the handler, and sit on his right. Then on command it would drop the ball and take the piece of dry meat that the handler would give him as his reward. How can I describe the excitement of testing your skill in the performance of your animal? The lesson learnt – you stand or fall by how your trainee performs – as important a lesson in corporate leadership as in training animals. A good coach after all is not the one who has the greatest knowledge, but the one whose team wins.

The biggest learning for me in these early years was the realization that no matter what you do, it is only worth doing if you aim at being the best in the world at it. And to be the best, it is essential to be passionate about what you do. I sincerely believe that it is impossible to excel in something that you do only halfheartedly or because you are forced to. It is impossible to be the best in the world in anything that you are not passionate about because you will never put in the heroic effort that is needed for you to succeed. Another realization was that when you are doing something that you are passionate about, you never get tired or stressed out. You are always fresh and full of energy and those around you also feel this. Passion is essential because it is the only thing which makes the heroic effort seem worthy of the goal. Only the passionate never compromise because compromise is the cancer which kills from within. Passion is infectious; so is compromise.  Stress occurs when we do things we don’t really enjoy.

My learning is that if you are in a situation where you find yourself doing something that you have no passion for, then it is essential to do one of two things: Either kindle a passion for this activity by learning more about it and seeing how it is valuable, or leave and find something that you do feel passionate about. It makes no sense to do something that you have no love for. Happiness is the result of doing something that is worthwhile, and which adds value and not of how much money you make or what rank you have. Interestingly, it is when the work feels worthless that people get overly concerned about titles, money, and perquisites. That is why I tell my clients who talk about compensation as an issue in people retention, “Money problems are not money problems, even when they are money problems.”  Most people complain about the compensation when they are uninspired about their work. The biggest proof of this are the many people in missionary and charitable activities who work all hours for next to nothing and are very happy doing their jobs. Happiness is therefore more about intangible rewards than about the tangible ones. That’s why I say, ‘If it can’t make you cry, it can’t make you work.’

Training dogs was a huge learning in human psychology. I learnt the importance of taking a stand and then remaining firmly on it without giving in to the pressure to change. I learnt that dogs and people will test your limits to see how firm you are. Once they test the boundaries and find that they can’t be pushed away, they accept them. Firmness and consistency are critical. There is nothing more debilitating than a leader who is ambivalent. I learnt the value of physical courage and how, if you stand with courage, you lend courage to those around you. I learnt the value of leading from the front and that there is only one leadership position – in the front – which is why those who follow are called ‘followers.’ What kind of a leader is it who has no followers? I learnt the value of quiet companionship – there is nothing more relaxing than sitting on a hillside with your dog beside you, watching the world go by. With Nawab Saab, you didn’t chatter. If you had something useful to say, you said it; if you had a question, you asked; otherwise you kept your mouth shut. The value of silence was appreciated. Without silence inside your head and heart and outside in terms of speaking, you can’t introspect or reflect. Silence has great value. We didn’t have intrusive gadgets to disturb our peace and so we valued silence. In the forest, silence also helps you to know who else is around. Knowledge that can be critical to survival and enjoyment of your experience.

Nawab Saab taught us to pay attention to the dogs and their highly developed faculties which warn of danger long before you would have been aware of it. This is where his storytelling really came into his own. Every lesson had a set of circumstances that it had been drawn from and that added value and meaning to it. This was not merely theory but hard-earned life experience that we were learning from. From my dogs, I learnt the value of unconditional love and complete trust in someone. When my dog got injured during training, I would order him to lie down and would then clean his wounds with hydrogen peroxide and stitch him up without anesthesia. The dog would lie there, sometimes whimpering in pain but never moving and never protesting or trying to harm me in any way. He trusted me completely and knew that what I was doing was for his good. There is nobody happier than a dog at seeing his master – no matter how ugly or dirty, poor or hungry, unfashionable or square his master may be. To the dog, his master is the best, most lovable, reliable, remarkable, and trustworthy human being in the world. And that has nothing to do with whether in fact this is true or not. The dog doesn’t care. Whatever the master may be to the rest of the world, to his dog he is the best in the world. And that is the secret of a great friendship and a great marriage. What you believe about someone and demonstrate in your dealing with them, is what they rise to embody. That is why they say, ‘Treat a man as if he is the best that he can be, and he becomes that.’ Many years later I dealt with some of the most intractable and obnoxious union leaders with great politeness, treating them as if they were heads of state and all their nastiness went away and I didn’t have to suffer any of it. People used to be surprised and asked me how I did it. I never let on the secret – that my dogs taught me this lesson. Some readers may not take kindly to being compared to dogs – but believe me, there is nothing more honorable in terms of friendship and loyalty. This is what Nawab Saab taught us and we learned these lessons well, very enjoyably and lived to realize their value throughout our lives.

As I mentioned earlier, Nawab Saab was requested to train a dog squad for Thengakal Estate in Vandiperiyar, Kerala. I don’t know if you have been inside a cardamom estate. Almost 30 years after this story, I raised and planted cardamom in the Anamallais and recalled those days when we were in that estate in Vandiperiyar. We trained the dogs in Vilayat Manzil and in the lands behind Yusuf Tekri in Towli Chowki. Today there isn’t an inch of vacant land in that place. In the early 70’s it was miles of barren land with scrub bushes, some Sitaphal (Custard Apple – Annona squamosa), some Lantana (Lantana camara), a sprinkling of Neem (Azadirachta indica), one or two Peepul (Ficus Religiosa) and an occasional Banyan (Ficus Benghalensis). We would load up the dogs in Khaja Nawab’s jeep and drive to Yusuf Tekri and then spend the day training the dogs. Since these dogs were being trained as trackers and guard dogs, the training was very intense. For tracking, we used Labradors whose sense of smell is more developed and keener than the other breeds we had. For guard/attack work, we used Dobermans and German Shepherds. But all dogs were taught everything as well, as a backup even though we used them, whenever possible, separately for these jobs.

It was fascinating to see how these different breeds worked. For a Doberman everything was a competition. The dog would get stressed out, angry and would bust his gut to do his best. A Labrador on the other hand took it all as a game and thoroughly enjoyed himself. He was playing and having fun, whether he was following a scent track or attacking an intruder and dragging him to the ground. Temperament has a big effect on the trainability and steadiness of dogs and humans under stressful conditions. Nawab Saab’s training technique was based on gaining the trust of the animal and persuading him to work. Nawab Saab never used force or punishment which was very commonly used by other trainers. The result was that Nawab Saab’s dogs worked much better than anyone else’s. The only catch was that training took longer than it would have taken if you simply beat the dog to a pulp and then forced him to obey. Our dogs were our friends and beating one was unthinkable. The other thing was the knowledge that success and failure was really ours, the trainer’s. Not the dog’s. If the dog didn’t perform, it was I who needed to look at my training technique, treatment of the dog, consistency of command and it was I who needed to work harder. ‘Failing’ the dog or punishing it was meaningless because the dog’s performance was a non-negotiable goal. Every dog was trainable and if it didn’t get trained, it was I who was at fault. Nobody needed to point that out to me. I knew it. I held myself accountable for it and I succeeded or failed by this standard.

Cut to our schooling technique today. Who passes or fails? Teacher or child? Who must really pass or fail? What would happen if we changed that to what really should happen and if teacher’s salaries were docked if children failed and they got a bonus if they excelled? Same thing for the corporate world. Companies succeed or fail because of what decision makers do. Not workers. But who gets laid off? Responsibility must lie where it belongs and those responsible must get the credit or pay the price. Not someone else, whose only fault was that they obeyed orders. Once again, sorry about the comparison, but it is precisely this ability to take learnings from one situation and apply them to a totally unrelated situation that distinguishes human learning from animal learning. That is what I learnt and that is how I learnt it. And that is why I say that I owe so much of my learning to the very unusual childhood and youth that I had and to mentors like Nawab Nazir Yar Jung, Uncle Rama and Aunty Mohini.

To return to our story, we finished our training and took the train with our dogs, to Cochin. The dogs were in the Brake Van at the end of the train. Every few stations, we would run to the back, unleash the dogs and take them out on the platform to stretch their legs and greet telephone poles. Then give them some water and back inside the Brake Van and we would run back to our compartment. Eventually we reached Cochin where the estate transport met us and we drove for another six hours to get to the estate to meet the Manager, Mr. Rudy Bosen.

Mr. Bosen very kindly invited Nawab Saab, me and Khaja Nawab to stay with him, and his wife, Dorothy made some wonderful chocolate ice cream for us for dessert after a lovely dinner. The estate had a big problem with theft as cardamom is a very valuable spice and easy to steal. A cardamom plantation is extremely dense and very easy to hide in. Thieves would come into the estate across the boundary at night, with sickles and jute bags and simply cut the ripe bunches of cardamom and take them away. To catch them in the dark was completely impossible. That is why Rudy Bosen thought of using dogs and contacted Nawab Saab for help. The dilemma was, how do you publicize the fact that now there are guard dogs which can catch thieves. The challenge was to have the dogs merely as an effective deterrent. Rudy Bosen didn’t really want anyone getting chewed up by a dog because in Kerala that would likely cause a bigger problem than the theft.

Nawab Saab had a unique idea. He asked Mr. Bosen to invite all union leaders and whoever wanted to come from the village to the estate to a dog show and competition at the end of which they would be given a sumptuous meal and could win cash prizes. People came in large numbers with great enthusiasm because there is nothing much to do in the plantations and any kind of entertainment draws big crowds. When everyone had settled down on the Muster ground under the marquee Nawab Saab, through an interpreter asked for volunteers to take part in the competition. He then picked six of the likeliest looking men. He told them to go and hide anywhere they wanted to, in the plantation. But before they went off, he took some item of clothing from each of them. He told them that he would give them half an hour to go and hide and then the dogs would find them. Meanwhile we put on a show of attack training which looks very ferocious indeed. For that also we took volunteers, dressed them up in protective clothing and then the dogs took them down. For a grown man, who thinks that he is strong, armed with a knife or stick, to have a dog taking him down in one smooth lethal attack, is very unnerving. That is what our objective was; to put the fear of the dogs in the minds of the people and any potential thieves.

Once this demo was over, we got the tracking dogs out and gave them the clothing to get a good sniff of and sent them into the plantation. The dogs disappeared in a jiffy. There was initially some rustling of leaves. Then total silence. We waited with bated breath as this was the final test of the pudding. If the dogs missed even one man, our reputation would be shot. We were literally putting our honor on the line. Then suddenly there was a scream. We ran into the plantation following the calling of the dog. The tracking dogs had been trained to ‘speak’. They would bark at regular intervals of a couple of seconds and would continue for as long as it took for the handler to get to it. Bow-wow-wow-wow and on, it would go. That told us that the dog had ‘treed’ the quarry or had pinned him down and the sound would guide us to the animal. The long and short of it was that we caught every single one of the men. Then we all came out of the jungle to where everyone was waiting to see what had happened. The men looked very sheepish and down in the mouth that they had not won the Rs. 1000 reward for the one who could escape the dog. In the 1970’s Rs. 1000 was big money. Mr. Bosen was a smart man. He still gave them consolation prizes for participating and then we all had lunch with the union leaders and all competitors. The result of this was that theft stopped on this estate as if someone had shut off a switch. The dogs had such an effect on the psyche of the people that nobody wanted to take a chance of meeting a dog in the dark of the night. As Sun Tzu says, ‘The wise general never fights a battle. He wins without fighting.’ I have yet to see a ‘general’ as wise as Nawab Nazir Yar Jung.