Dehradun was a city of ghosts. Not the kind that haunted graveyards, but the ones that whispered through ivy-covered corridors and creaked behind colonial doors — bureaucrats, soldiers, spies. Tucked into the wooded hills just beyond the Doon Valley, hidden past the known institutions like the Indian Military Academy and Forest Research Institute, lay a campus with no gateboard, no open day, and no public website.
This was Prajnadhara Institute of National Excellence — PINE.
Founded decades ago as a silent collaboration between India's internal security, atomic research division, and select political dynasties, PINE was not designed to educate the masses. It was created to distill the nation's most dangerous minds — thinkers, planners, officers who could handle the truths the country wasn't ready to speak aloud.
Admission wasn't about marks. It was about patterns. Behavioral. Cognitive. Psychological. Every student accepted had something in their file that made them unusable in the public system — either too brilliant, too rebellious, or too dangerous.
In 2012, three such students arrived in the same batch. They would become a storm that no syllabus could contain.
Agniveesh Arrives
Agniveesh was the first to check in. He arrived with a single black suitcase and a folder marked Analytical Deviation Reports – North-East Corridor. His hair was neat, his shirt wrinkle-free, and his walk straight-backed like a man used to attention — but tired of it.
He didn't speak much. Just nodded at the warden, settled into his room on the eastern wing of the Hall of Strategic Sciences, and by evening, had already requested access to Level-2 archives — something usually done in the second year.
His roommate tried to strike up a conversation that night.
"Hey man, you play any sport?"Agniveesh didn't even turn."Diplomacy."
He didn't mean board games.
Aadesh Explodes In
A few days later came Aadesh. Noisy. Magnetic. Dressed in a faded leather jacket, holding a gym bag and a pressure cooker. He barged into the mess hall like he owned it and started serving rice before the staff could stop him.
Born in Kanpur, bred on chaos, Aadesh had a face that could charm a courtroom and fists that had already rewritten his high school's disciplinary code. But beneath his surface was a mind that read faster than it spoke. He knew systems. And he knew they were fragile.
In the first week, he earned a five-day warning for hacking into the registrar's terminal and renaming all third-year students after extinct animals. He was not punished. He was observed.
Then Came Veer
Nobody noticed Veer arrive. The warden wasn't sure when he checked in. His name simply appeared on the rooming list, and his bed in the Applied Geostrategics Wing was suddenly occupied.
He never wore branded clothes. Usually just long-sleeved cotton shirts, steel-rimmed glasses, and a dusty canvas satchel that held hand-marked nuclear treaties and a hand-annotated copy of the Taittiriya Upanishad.
In his first seminar on Global Strategic Energy, he didn't say a word. Until, that is, two students got into a shouting match over India's dependency on foreign uranium.
Then Veer spoke — flatly, without raising his voice:
"There is no dependency. There is permission. And permission can be withdrawn. Which makes your nuclear policy not a policy — but a lease."
The professor stopped. Scribbled something in his register. A note Veer would never see:
Find out how he knows this. And from whom.
First Sparks
The three were thrown together during a multi-disciplinary group project:"Design a twenty-year energy framework that includes geopolitics, trade disruptions, and internal sabotage."
Agniveesh tried to dominate the analysis. Aadesh attacked the assumptions. But Veer — Veer redrew the entire model.
"We've made a mistake," he said, "We're assuming we'll still be buying uranium. What if we just... found a way to stop needing permission?"
The room fell quiet.
That night, on the terrace of their hostel block, under a fog-drenched sky that blurred the stars, a new kind of conversation began.
From Classmates to Co-Conspirators
At first, it was theory — uranium extraction from sea sands, thorium-based reactors, illegal mining corridors in Northeast India. All late-night intellectual banter.
But it deepened.
Aadesh would talk about how the police reforms he studied were cosmetic.Agniveesh pointed out the loopholes in strategic affairs that let intelligence fail upward.Veer, with an unnerving calm, would mention unsurveyed islands — old Portuguese records, satellite blind spots, pressure leaks in the global supply chain.
They didn't know it yet. But the pillars of a future command were being carved in those talks.
They weren't dreaming of a cartel. Not yet.They were dreaming of a system that didn't ask permission.They were dreaming of sovereignty without approval.
The Day It All Shifted
It was the end of their first winter term. A secret guest lecturer — retired RAW analyst — walked them through "classified failures of India's uranium intelligence."
Most students took notes.
Agniveesh stood up and challenged the analysis outright.Aadesh backed him, pulling incident reports from a different region.Veer didn't speak. He just walked to the chalkboard and drew a route.
From India's eastern ports. Through Burmese waters. To a chain of unnamed islands.
He wrote two words under it:
Blind Spot.
That was the night they started looking differently at maps. Not as borders. But as opportunities.
End of Year One
By the end of their first year at PINE, they were known — and feared. Not because they misbehaved. But because they saw too much. Professors began tiptoeing around them. They were no longer students. They were something else.
"We won't find a place in this country," Agniveesh once said on the terrace."Then we'll build one," Veer answered."But it'll be illegal," Aadesh smirked."Only if they catch us," Agniveesh replied.
They didn't yet have the name Trinetra Command.They didn't have an army, a refinery, or an island.
But they had each other.And they had the thought — the first fracture in the dam.