“There’s a point at which the conscious mind just gives up.” He sits across from me. Not on the other side of the oak desk but on the same side. Striking distance away. He’s about 5′10″. Maybe about 185 pounds. You’d never notice him, and that’s the key: you’d never notice him. His name is Nirmalya Bhowmick, and it probably doesn’t mean anything to you. If it does, you already know what’s going to be said here, and you’re probably shocked he let me say it. If it doesn’t, you need to know that this is where we go from sports story to truer-tales-have-never-been-told type of story. Translation: from prototype to archetype, because Bhowmick trades in fighting (dare it be said) for keeps.
The public face? Well, he’s the founder of the California University of Protection-Intelligence Management. Former founder of a storied but distinctly and suspiciously non-ambitious academy for the hyperaggressive art of muay thai, the deadly Southeast Asian kickboxing discipline that brings arcing knees and slashing elbows into a picture remarkably bereft of any defense.
The private face? That’s harder to see, and as we wander the halls of his San Jose, California, based institute of higher learning, all marbled floors, past doors with brass plaques that read Admissions, Registrar, Dean of Students, and well-turned-out white guys who’d be at home in any insurance office, Bhowmick makes intros to the faculty. Business cards are brandished, and the military prefixes affixed to the names start to make things a little clearer. As do the firm grips, steady gazes, and the whole Sgt. Rock schmear. One’s just gotten back from Baghdad. Was he serving?
Silence. Then, eventually a slow, sure nod.
Okay. We’ll get back to that.
At forty-four years old, Bhowmick looks at least ten years younger. Good clean living, I offer—and this is important—without a single hint of a smirk. He smiles, and in a nondescript back-room office the bookshelf is lined with course study and books that range from How to Read a Newspaper to dark-science shit on terrorism, counterterrorism, close-quarter combat, interrogation, insurgency, and protection. The best defense is a good offense, I suddenly remember. But he was mid-stream in explaining to me what his cage was for.
Not the cagefighters kind of cage, the kind with rubber-coated chain-link topped with cushioning foam and turnbucklesque stanchions every few feet. No, this is a steel cage. Like a prison-cell cage. About eight feet across, ten feet high, with an enclosed top and a door opening that is low to the ground. Like they were expecting a dog to be going in there. Or an unconscious man to be pulled out.
“I can tell you exactly when the conscious mind gives up. This is not rocket science,” says Bhowmick. “It’s usually about two minutes and ten seconds in.” And Bhowmick describes a scenario where one man faces two men in the cage. He tells the first man that the other two are going to be hitting him for three minutes. He’s to defend and counter. The good part is that they will only be attacking with one strike. The bad news is that they will strike him for the entire three minutes. Whether or not he’s defending himself. “The first minute most guys are pretty game. The second minute gets tougher, and then about two minutes and ten seconds in, his conscious thinking just stops and he either starts to use what we’ve taught him or …” He trails off, and then I remember the doggy door.
“The idea is that if you fight from where the conscious mind is, you’re just trying to think your way through instead of ACTING your way through it. Instead of doing it.” Bhowmick clears his throat. “I want to destroy that whole ‘thinking’ part of the process and get straight to doing, and the way that you do that, the way that you get to that is by drilling down beyond the conscious mind to where the real learning happens: the subconscious mind. Sometimes you have to do things one hundred times … one thousand times … through fatigue or stress … until that becomes the thing that you automatically do.”
But stuntmen routinely ridicule those stuntman schools and those that come from them. Is it possible that although this is the way he’s teaching, this is not the way that he learned? Which is to say: We’ll do what you say, but what did YOU do? Which is when it comes.
“Well, when I was knife-fighting in the streets of Calcutta …”
This is a lead-in that works no matter what kind of party you’re going to. No matter where you’re going with it.
“When I was knife-fighting in the streets of Calcutta …” And he pulls up his sleeve to show a dark cicatrix on his right wrist, where, he claims, knives have come to play. “I knew that unlike the sports competitor who knows if he doesn’t win that he just goes home a loser, I was impressed by the fact that I might not go home at all if I was not properly motivated.”
And we have to digress upon digression because of the party line that’s still got me hooked. Knife-fighting in the streets of Calcutta, indeed.
Bhowmick’s family life in Calcutta was as far from the Black Hole as far could be. “I never touched a plate, not to get it to the table nor to clean up after I had eaten. We had servants.”
Perhaps the profile of the Calcutta knife-fighter.
“Well, I also used to go to the school, St. James, in Calcutta. It was a Christian school.”
Christian Calcutta knife-fighter. Sorry. My correction.
“It was actually across the street from where Mother Teresa had her place. And I used to go over there and help out, and while being there I tried to understand why we had so much while these others had so little. No one could give me any answers that made sense to me … but I knew that if I could do something to stop it, or to somehow make it okay, well, I’d be fulfilling a kind of destiny. And this followed me my whole life. So I got into lots of fights just because … well, there are two types of people. Those who walk by problems, and the other kind. I was the other kind.”
WHILE MY KNIFE GENTLY WEEPS …
The occasion was a seminar. The seminar was an invite-only affair. Except the invites were not written, nor mailed, but spoken in a gentle aside, full of the sort of underworld understatement that makes one man mistake an “Okay, now you’re dead” for an “Okay.”
“I’m going to have a special class. You should come,” Nirmalya Bhowmick said in fadeaway, as he busied himself with some stuff behind his desk. I heard it—the strategic use of the word “should.” And so there I was later, gathered in a tight knot of others—cops, maybe mercs, er, “military contractors,” with no weekend warriorage anywhere to be seen.
(See Walter Salles’ classically underrated A Grande Arte, 1991, for a filmic, and albeit stylized look into the finer points of what it LOOKS like). The subject at hand: knife fighting. How to, what to use. No mention of the WHY, except it was sort of silently assumed: you had no other choice.
And because you have no other choice, there you are looking at a knife. While any knife can be used for fighting, sort of like any rock you can hold in your hand is a rock you can throw, there are better knives and worse knives to use if you want to use it and live to use it again. Again: if you have NO OTHER choice.
Oh, and only use a four-inch blade or shorter if you just want to play. It takes something longer than four inches to get through all the fascia, chest muscles, and rib cage, and into the heart.
STYLE: Filipinos have a kick-ass stick fighting art, escrima, which can easily be modified to include knives. Except, according to Bhowmick, “knives are used differently than you use a stick.” Because sticks rarely pierce, or at least take too much effort to do so with your garden-variety stick, they stop … whereas knives pierce and just keep going. But the mechanics are similar. Let’s view the body like an X—two arms in the air, two legs on the ground. IF you want to play, this is all that matters. If you want to bleed someone out slllloooowwwww. Arm attacks and leg attacks are good. Upward slashing maneuvers with the knife tucked underneath toward your little finger are good when the person you’re fighting has no knife (we ain’t going to ask).
But if the person you’re fighting HAS a knife? Yeah, you wanna go West Side Story and hold the knife forward, finger twisted around the ricasso, and think about counting to four, since the fourth button on a button-down shirt is where you need to go to stop a heart. Which is our thoroughly genteel way of saying, ice the motherfucker, whether he’s wearing a button-down, a T-shirt, or no shirt at all. Not slashing (play time) but stabbing (work time). There’s a big difference. And a lot of times, that has everything to do with what you’re going to say when it’s over (if you’re alive to say anything at all). In short: if you had to kill him, make sure that’s a HAD to kill him. Or you’re likely to have many more occasions, on the shower-room side of your local penitentiary, to practice your fine new art.
The other kind, who prior to the street scrapping wandered into a restaurant at eight or nine years old and tracked down the Thai cook who he had heard knew muay thai and started on a road that had him at the Muang Surin camp in Bangkok. The road that led to studying with Dentharonee Muang Surin and Sensak Muag Surin (the names probably won’t matter to you but know that these are just some more men who could kill you as quickly as they could look at you). The road that had him picking up Pashtun, Urdu, Nepali, Hindi, and English. And probably the selfsame road that rewarded his scholarship in the blood arts with a call from a family friend in the Indian Ministry of Defense, and a subsequent involvement with intelligence work.
And this is where he leans toward me and asks me to turn off the tape recorder and in total life-and-death fashion asks me to be circumspect about what I say from here on out. He could get in trouble. But more importantly, I could get in trouble.
Like the kind of trouble you got into in Burma?
“Oh. You remember that?”
Of course I did. My association with Bhowmick goes back fifteen years, to when he was operating as an occasional gem dealer and full-time muay thai instructor. The gem thing seemed a curious conceit. But what I called a conceit he called a cover, and that, combined with the martial arts, allowed him to travel and train fighters in the art of fighting and other, um, “stuff,” you know? And as luck would have it, there he was in Burma. Training students. And that’s the way he says it, students. No quotes around that word; in fact, no quotes around almost everything I think should have quotes around it, which is almost everything he’s said since he started hinting around the whole “CIA operative” trip. But I must assume that they were real card-carrying students and that we haven’t slipped into the intelligence-community rabbit hole where everyone’s a “freedom fighter” and words never seem to mean what they say.
“I was training these students and back then there was lots of unrest and one of the students called me one day to say that he had heard that the Burmese secret police were going to pay me a visit because I guess some of my students happened to be Karens. Freedom fighters.”
No going back to the hotel to collect his belongings. No passing GO and collecting $200. Just beating it out of Dodge. And, of course, that last-minute twist that makes movies so movie-like: a forgotten, much-needed address book.
“I called back to the hotel and they told me that the address book was there, but that some government agents of some kind had been there, and so I left. Without it. And have actually never been back.”
So it goes. Later trips to Dubai. And even more than that. The stuff between the ellipses from the secured server part of the CUPIM website: “Dozens of clandestine intelligence operations, counter-terrorism assignments and high risk protection operations spread over 20 plus countries throughout his career.”
Perfect.
The trick was to get those who fought not for fun but for keeps to talk about fighting for keeps without drawing undue and distinctly unhealthy associations with the nature of interpersonal struggle and those who professionally engage in such (and without getting them arrested).
SO YOU’VE BEEN STABBED:
SIGNS YOU MAY HAVE LOST A FIGHT
“If a fox is chasing a hare you have two fundamentally different ways of viewing the same event: the fox is thinking very much about dinner. The hare is thinking about his life. And with these come different sets of motivations and methods.”
Nirmalya Bhowmick’s knife-fighting seminar zeroes in on those differing methods of dealing with edged weapons in a conflict that might see no interfering ref, no timed rounds, and no do-overs. “You must think like the hare. And the number-one thing you must think, as well as say to yourself, if you find yourself in a knife fight, the one thing that might save your life, is your understanding that TODAY YOU WILL BLEED A LITTLE.
“This way you won’t be so surprised when it happens.” And it seems like, at least on the streets of Calcutta, where Bhowmick cut his teeth, almost literally, it will happen. “A knife is just an extension of your hand. Part of your arm. So if someone can touch you in a fight, if they have a knife they can cut you. In fact, I’d rather face a man with a gun than a man with a knife any day. Because a man with a gun might miss. A man with a knife will always cut you.
But you’ll do okay if you:
Accept that you will bleed.
Maintain a mission-oriented commitment.
Have a philosophical idealism, or, some would say, faith; and
Use aggressive approaches with better technique to win the day.
Dale Carnegie couldn’t have said it better.
But even this was a loaded thicket. Lt. Col. David Grossman in his sensitively titled tome On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1996) states that in any given population a certain percentage of pre-existing psychotics will be capable of carrying fighting well beyond the parameters of sport into killing. And do so while suffering nary a negative side effect—hence the psychotic part. This subgroup, less than 5 percent, he rules out of serious consideration, averaged out with the pacifists, before he proceeds with his hand-wringing premise that killing is unnatural.
Bhowmick smiles. “There’s a difference between a combat specialist and a psychotic. But if you give me ten men I can turn fifty percent into killers.” Useful, I guess, if killer and fighter sit along the same continuum … but, in Bhowmick’s case it seems, at least so far as he willing to admit, his actions have been protective in nature. For instance, the public face of his university is Michael Corcoran, former Secret Service man, purportedly on presidential detail the day that Reagan got shot. These guys are taking shots, not giving them.
But then I am reminded of the wildly seesawing angle of attack on both of these. After Larry Flynt got shot and paralyzed, security in his Wilshire Boulevard redoubt was muscular and structured the way good security is usually structured: present but not too present. Then-executive editor Allan MacDonell was escorting me through the offices, where I was meeting him to discuss my first article for Hustler: a potboiler about collections thugs. I asked about Larry’s security and MacDonell said significantly, “They do a real good job of protecting Larry from bad things. Sometimes they protect him from bad things before they even happen.” And it hung there in the air, just like that—an odd and swinging admixture of ying and yang.
So it goes with Bhowmick’s career arc: a Hindu in a Christian school who was attracted to Buddhism, muay thai, the righting of wrongs, the wronging of rights … study on the Japanese Red Army, Baader Meinhof, the PLO, and then a sudden superhero-esque desire to stand against the ills.
But when I paraphrase that line from the Nicholas Cage flick Lord of War, that every thug with a gun and a dream calls himself a “freedom fighter,” he just smiles. “In Darjeeling in the late 1800s there was a monastery, and the monks there believed that life is impermanent, death is unavoidable, and trying to do something good costs a lot.”
How much?
He smiles and tells me to come back if I have any further questions, and so I do. I call back several times and he’s out of country, and busy, or in the country and busy. I get a hold of him one more time and he’s cordial as cordial can be, but when I make a move to ask my follow-up questions he’s like quicksilver until I realize that I, in actual fact, already have my answer: a lot.
FIGHTERS IN THE NEWS … FOR SOMETHING OTHER THAN CAGE FIGHTING
Times Online
June 26, 2006
CAGE FIGHTER HELD OVER
£53 MILLION KENT ROBBERY
By Adam Fresco
A man arrested in Morocco in connection with Britain’s biggest cash robbery was today named as martial arts expert Lee Murray.
Mr Murray, who is believed to have been under surveillance for several weeks, was detained in the capital Rabat yesterday on suspicion of kidnap and robbery.
Kent police also revealed that two men had been arrested on Friday in connection with money laundering. They said that a “significant amount” of money had been recovered but refused to confirm reports that it was £1 million.
The money was still being counted and forensically examined today to see if it was connected to the £53 million Securitas raid in Tonbridge, Kent, four months ago.
Moroccan police swooped on the suspect, who is known as Lee “Lightning” Murray, while he was with other men near the Mega Mall in the Souisi district.
Mr Murray, 26, is a well-known cage fighter, who has appeared on television. Cage fighting is a mixture of kick boxing and wrestling in which contestants fight in a cage.
Mr Murray, who is from the South London area, nearly died last year when he was stabbed outside a London nightclub.
Detective Superintendent Paul Gladstone, Kent Police’s head of Serious and Major Crime, said that the UK would now be seeking Mr Murray’s extradition.
Britain has no formal extradition treaty with Morocco, so would have to make a special, one-off request. The last extradition from Morocco to Britain was in 1995.
Speaking outside Kent Police HQ, Mr Gladstone said: “At 4.30pm yesterday Moroccan police officers arrested a 26-year-old man, Lee Murray, of Sidcup, South London, near the Mega Mall shopping centre in the capital city, Rabat.
“He was arrested for robbery, kidnap and other offences linked to the £53 million Securitas raid in Tonbridge, Kent, in February.
“The arrest was made with the authority of the Crown Prosecution Service, Kent Police and the Moroccan authorities. The man is in custody in Rabat and the United Kingdom is now seeking extradition.
“We are grateful for the help of the Moroccan authorities and Foreign and Commonwealth Office in this matter.
“This latest development is part of our ongoing investigation and our inquiries continue.
“We are aware that some media are reporting that a further £1 million cash has been recovered, linked to the Securitas robbery.
“Working with Surrey and Hampshire Police, we did arrest a number of people in Surrey and Hampshire on Friday and have now charged two men, from Devon and Hampshire, with the offence of money laundering. A significant amount of cash was recovered.
“However, we are not able to confirm the amount at this stage or link the cash to the robbery or any similar crime. The money is now being counted and forensically examined.”
Five men and two women have already been charged in connection with the robbery and are due to appear in court next month.
Raiders netted £53,116,760 in the early hours of February 22. Most of the cash is still missing.
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk)