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to increase pay and provide decent rations during the training period.
He loved music and gave patronage to a talented INA orchestra, which
created a repertoire of inspiring songs set to innovative tunes. Music,
quite as much as the supreme commander’s speeches, was deployed to
raise morale—the key asset of any revolutionary army.^35
Time was of the essence, in view of the overall war situation. Bose
worked incredibly hard and slept on average for three hours per night.
During the early months at his Meyer Road residence in Singapore, he
was often still hard at work, with a glass of brandy and a cup of coffee
by his elbow, when Abid Hasan left him at midnight. The next morn-
ing, Hasan could tell from the number of cigarette butts in the ashtray
how late Bose had worked at his desk. Bose was up at the crack of
dawn, which is when he was thought to say his prayers. A rosary of
beads and a small copy of the Gita were his constant companions, but
he never made a public display of his religiosity. “He never even once
spoke his God in public,” his colleague S. A. Ayer has written. “He lived
him.” The day would be spent visiting the Indian Inde pen dence League
headquarters on Chancery Lane and the Supreme Command head-
quarters and training camps, as well as attending numerous meetings
to discuss strategy or build mass support. He refused to discuss work
over dinner and instead held forth on the va ri ety of fish recipes or
the different ways of cooking spinach and bitter gourd (karela). He
was invariably kind to his subordinates (though he sometimes scolded
those who were really close to him), and made them feel at ease when
they were around him. He loved all animals except cats, a species he
had to accept reluctantly in his home, since they were Abid Hasan’s fa-
vorites. After a long day’s work in Singapore, he would sometimes drive
to the Ramakrishna Mission, an or ga ni za tion founded by Swami Vive-
kananda. There he would change from his military attire into a silk
dhoti, meditate for an hour or two, and emerge rejuvenated. Even
though he was the most turbulent fig ure in Southeast Asia during the
war, his closest associates found him serene and Buddha- like in quiet
moments.^36
On October 21, 1943, Netaji proclaimed the formation of the Provi-
sional Government of Azad Hind (“Free India”) in Singapore. Sibbier
Appadurai Ayer has described how Netaji wrote the proclamation him-