Retired Vice-Admiral Benjamin Abraham Samson, He was commandant of the National Defence Academy in Khadakvasla between 1959 and 1962 . Admiral Samson got a direct commission as lieutenant to the Royal Indian Navy in 1939. After serving in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Bay of Bengal, his was the last ship out of Rangoon, the capital of Burma, when it fell to the Japanese.
"I was so surprised a few years ago when a man came to me at a club and told me I had saved his life in Rangoon. He said he was on board the passenger ship Chilka which we escorted out."
His family, like most Bene Israels or the children of Israel, came from the Konkan coast -- and the naval officer makes it clear there is no merit in focusing on him merely because he is a Jew.
"I am an Indian and have been entrusted with some of the most critical assignments for my country," says the officer who sent his nine-year-old daughter to the famed Rukmini Devi Arundale's school Kalakshetra in Chennai so that she could be exposed to Indian classical dance and music.
"I have never emphasised my Jewishness. There were times I didn't even know I was a Jew and that is true secularism," says the officer who commanded the Sutlej off the coast of Karachi when India won Independence.
Having visited Israel two or three times, once on a quiet mission for the defence ministry, two of Admiral Samson's children and his wife Laila once spent six weeks in a kibbutz Ein Hashofet. His eldest son went on to marry an Israeli girl whom he met in the community kitchen and now lives in Canada.
The two Jewish practices the retired naval officer devoutly follows is saying a Hebrew prayer before going to bed and respectfully touching the mezuzah on entering and leaving his house.