271 Lt Col Dilbag Singh Dabas (Retd) As a student, Chiman Singh Yadav was passionate about swimming and diving in the village pond. In 1961, he accompanied a group of students to watch the Republic Day Parade in Delhi. There he saw for the first time a tableau of a ship, with young men atop attired in immaculate whites performing mock drills on diving from the deck. Fascinated, he needed no counselling on what career to choose. Lt Commander Joseph PA Noronha Son of Rao Nand Kishore Yadav, Chiman was born at Gokalgarh village in Gurgaon district of then undivided Punjab on June 1, 1945. Gokalgarh, incidentally, was one of the villages in the water-starved south-west Haryana called Ahirwal. Some of the villages though had small ponds to fetch water from when the wells went dry.