Rogue Police

Dr. Rajesh Talwar, one of the accused in the now famous NOIDA double murder case was arrested on May 23rd and has since then been in custody. Although he is produced in court every now and then, bail is always denied on the pretext that further questioning is needed or various tests still need to be done. Guilty or not, even before anything is conclusively pinned on him, he has spent a month and more in jail and who knows how long he will have to stay.

What is worrisome is the manner in which he has been detained for so long a time. Dr. Talwar’s situation is not a tangled web full of complexities and spanning counties and continents like say Charles Sobhraj. Till the day of his daughter’s death, he was living a very typical normal and middle class life. There is no criminal record that he had from past days that needs looking into. Dr. Talwar is no hardened criminal who would have learned the art of handling tough interrogation – as police clients go, he would have been among the softest they would have handled, and yet between the NOIDA police and the CBI, his questioning and interrogation seems to be dragging on forever.

We have been fixated on mostly on the human rights violations that the police and other Paramilitary forces supposedly carry out in the form of encounter killings of terrorists and under world dons. These have been even glamorized in ways with Bollywood basing many of their scripts on real life police “encounter specialists” with very little attempts at disguise. Closely related is the phenomenon of torture, custodial deaths and sub human treatment. Largely this happens to people for whom there is little public sympathy or to the anonymous and impoverished delinquent; again some one who has no one to defend them. Dr. Talwar’s case is an interesting one where he has no criminal record, no hardened criminal, not much of a likelihood of him absconding or scooting off to another country. Even so he continues in jail seemingly forever. Even the CBI who are supposedly the wizards in crime investigation are sweating and struggling to question and make sense of the answers of a man like Dr. Talwar who probably had never even seen the inside of a police lock up till now beats reason.

A recent campaign that originated in Mumbai and is now aiming to spread else where to expose inappropriate practices in the police including corruption was started by I K Chuggani. A retired man himself, he began harnessing the potential, energy and the connections of many other retired people in Mumbai to start a campaign against rogue elements in the police. They have a web site, a very strong Facebook presence as well as the infrastructure of a registered non profit based in Mumbai. It is truly a citizens’ movement and one that is looking not merely for money but active involvement and volunteerism, more actively on their Facebook group. Do look them up and join in. Looking at the predicament of Dr. Talwar, I for one paused to wonder for a moment as to what my coping mechanism might be if I were in a situation similar to his and sadly enough, I found none.

Increasing Communication – Declining Communion

An interesting article from the British paper, The Guardian caught my attention recently. It bemoaned the fact that a large number of post offices were closing in the British country side, particularly inconveniencing the elderly for who the post office was more than a place to buy stamps and post letters; in deprived urban areas, post offices are banks for local people and crucial sources of benefits. In rural villages that have lost schools and every other shop, it is often the last local service left standing. The post office is the last community hub left.

India’s villages haven’t got there yet, but our towns probably have. We don’t have any more community hubs left any more and a sense of community in the bigger cities is all but gone, surrounded as we are by walled houses, often enclosed by high gates and fences and manned by dogs and security guards. In fact the one thing to be said for slums is that because of their forced deprivation of space and privacy, they have to create communities to manage their clutter and chaos.

As in many other cases when environments change rapidly, the elderly are perhaps the most affected. In the area where I live, in the parks that still fortunately still survive in some numbers. They throng the neighborhood parks in the evenings and some times in the early mornings but though they have the companionship of their peers, they appear lonely. The young are missing as they are busy with their own pursuits; some times grand children are to be seen, but this strange bonding is often the bonding of the bizarre – the grand parents are stand in baby sitters for their sons and daughters and baby sitting is the chore that they often perform as a retainer ship for their board and lodge.

The younger lot often has set up shop in platforms like Facebook or Orkut. There is a community for folks who live in my community to meet up on line or Orkut and Facebook and BigAdda and all the rest. Whether the online communities will really amount to any thing, I suppose only time will tell, the research is too young yet for us to have any clear findings on which to base conclusions.

Coming back to the closing post offices, one of the key reasons cited for their closing is the fact that due to the ease and cost of sending e mails, no one or virtually no one in the UK is writing conventional letters, sticking stamps on them and then trundling along to the post office to post them. For some, real time communication is every thing and instant messaging has begun replacing e mail which is slowly becoming passé. Similarly another key revenue stream for the Post Office, the greeting card business in the holiday season – with people sending fewer and fewer Greeting Cards.

I do not know how many of us still have old letters – papers yellowing with age and fragile; but billowing with emotions and over flowing with the fragrance of friends, love and laughter. Although I too have moved with many others to the electronic era and write few letters myself, there is still the sense of mourning at the passing of an era that I at one time have known and loved. There are letters that on a given day I might still take out and read – letters with a hand writing, some smudged ink and perhaps a fraying envelope but encased lie within words that inspired and encouraged and conveyed hugs and embraces that physical distanced dis allowed but an envelope with a stamp and a heavy footed post mark could still convey.

Can a print out of an e mail do that or an emoticon on an IM? Sure they have their uses and are fast, reliable and robust for business communication. But outside of Business, though e mail is not going to go away any time soon if ever, I am sure that an e mail print devoid of signatures, distinctive hand writing styles, words and letters can never replace the sense of communion and community and friendship that can really nurture on life’s long and often lonely journey.