The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the bomb blasts

I watched a bit of the Swedish adaptation of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night. It was better than watching ranting anchors and ranting politicians and ranting analysts, but even so I couldn't watch more than 15 minutes. Adaptations usually employ actors who look better than their literary counterparts. It's a sensible policy, because it's easier to read about ugly people than to watch ugly people on screen for extended periods. For some reason, the Swedes decided that they would make all the Dragon Tattoo characters plainer than they are in the book. There's Larsson's hero Mikael Blomkvist, for example, a middle-aged journalist who has a mysterious power over women. For those who have not read Stieg Larsson's trilogy, it's worth knowing that the male characters are, almost all of them, rapists and murderers; Blomkvist is the very opposite. He's good with women, and quite indiscriminate in his tastes. He sleeps with every woman he meets and, unlike James Bond, doesn't even have to seduce them. Without exception, they make the first move. Reading the books, you wonder why so many women would fall for him; and watching the actor playing him makes suspension of disbelief even tougher. Maybe the actor is famous in Sweden, in which case his fame might have compensated for his lack of charm. But the director has decided to film everybody in the most unflattering light possible, so they all look corpse-grey and unsexy in the extreme.
For the English adaptation, they've apparently got James Bond playing Mikael Blomkvist. Daniel Craig will probably be pleased to ditch the seduction routines.
I guess I should say something about the explosions. One was about a kilometer from my home as the crow flies, and another about a kilometer from where I was last evening. I was leaving a Kemp's Corner bookshop when I got a message about the first blast; within a minute all phone lines were jammed. I decided to eat a sandwich in the bookshop's cafe, giving any other bombs that might have been planted time to explode. Afterward I got a cab home. The streets were calm and not very crowded.
Bombs are something we have to live with now. Obviously, like other nasty things we have to live with, such as murder and robbery, it's important to minimise the number of incidents. We haven't had any attacks for two years and a half, which I think is good going. I'll happily take one attack every two years that kills about twenty of us, and accept the risk of being one of those twenty next time round.
For those who don't know Bombay well, more than ten people die on the city's rail tracks every day. Over twenty thousand have died in the past five years hit by trains while trying to cross the tracks. Many of those could've been saved if we had a good rescue service organised. But we don't. We depend on guys living by the tracks who haul bloodied and broken bodies to hospitals, and then wait for tips from relatives of the wounded or dead.
Deaths on rail tracks are very different from deaths from terrorism, of course. The individuals took a risk by crossing the tracks, and broke the law as well. I don't want to suggest an equivalence between the two modes of dying. I'm just pointing to how atrocious our systems and infrastructure are. Considering that, and considering it isn't all that difficult to make a bomb, I'm surprised we have not had more attacks since November 2008. Also that other cities have not had more attacks. We need only look at Pakistan's current condition to understand how bad things could get.

Cops and robbers: dumb and dumber

Early this month, my sister Renuka's Mitsubishi Pajero was stolen from her building's compound. A compound ought to be secure, but for some reason this one has a gate at the back. The guard was hanging out, or napping, at the front door while thieves managed to break into the car and drive it out the back gate.
By the time the robbery was discovered at least five hours had passed and the thieves could easily have been at the state's border. It was pretty devastating. Renuka and my brother-in-law Ashutosh filed a complaint, but the police said a professional gang had been targetting Pajeros for four years and chances of the SUV being found were slim.
Then, a week ago, Renuka received a call from Jalpaiguri police station saying they had her car. Jalpaiguri is on the Nepal / Bhutan border, so the thieves apparently aimed to drive it right out of India. They'd crossed a dozen states seemingly without hassle, but were stopped in West Bengal by cops who felt they didn't appear to have the means to be driving an SUV. They asked the men, one Nepali, one Bihari, for their papers, which were not in order. They searched the car and found, wait for it, the car's original license plates in the dickey. Guys who couldn't throw out license plates were unlikely to have erased chassis numbers. The police traced the Mitsubishi dealer through the vehicle identification number; the dealer gave them my sister's contact. And so it was that, out of the blue, Renuka got a call that lifted the depression which had hung about her house for two weeks.
Maybe the thieves believed they could bribe their way out of any tough spot. Maybe the police were more alert and more honest because West Bengal's administration has just changed after 34 years of Communist rule. Whatever the story behind their arrest, it was very nice of the robbers to preserve evidence of their crime, and to keep it in the first place anybody would look.
The car hasn't actually been returned yet. After impounding it, the Jalpaiguri police asked for the original FIR to be faxed to them. The Versova cops reluctantly agreed to do it, but then forgot, or decided that helping to convict criminals was not part of their job description. Finally, Ashutosh faxed his own copy of the complaint, and that should hopefully do the trick.

The Central Bureau of Investigation has shown the world exactly how incompetent it is by making public a list of terrorists and criminals it claims are being sheltered by Pakistan, only for the media to discover one fearsome militant hanging out in a suburb of Bombay, and another lodged in Arthur Road jail. No doubt more of the missing terrorists will soon be found in plain sight. When I read stories like this, I wonder how police manage to catch any criminals at all. Well, the story of my sister's car indicates that, if our cops are dumb, our thieves are often dumber.

Digvijay Singh's lie about Hemant Karkare

Here's what Digvijay Singh said in an interview with the Indian Express published on December 11, 2010: “On November 26, 2008, at 7 pm, just about two hours before the attacks in Mumbai started, Hemant Karkare, the slain ATS chief rang me on my mobile and told me how his family and his life were blighted by constant threats from people annoyed by his investigations into the Malegaon blasts."
The remark became controversial, and Maharashtra's Home Minister R R Patil issued a statement saying there was no record of Karkare and Singh having spoken at the time mentioned. Now, Singh has produced telephone records which he claims vindicate his position. Except they do not. What the records show is that Singh called Karkare, not the other way round. It's a crucial difference. I don't like the idea of police officers contacting politicians to whine: I'd think less of Hemant Karkare if he'd done what Digvijay Singh said he did. However, if a politician calls a police officer he is acquainted with, it's perfectly acceptable for the policeman to mention in passing that he is being threatened. Moreover, we only have Digvijay Singh's word for what was actually said. If Singh could lie about who called whom, he could well twist the contents of the conversation.
I've been very critical about the police in a number of posts on this blog. There are, however, a few perfectly honest, dedicated officers who stand apart within the force. Hemant Karkare was one of them. Digvijay Singh lied when he said Karkare called him the day he was killed. I hope newspapers and TV channels covering the issue highlight the difference between making a call and answering it.

A reason to cheer?

Today's Mumbai Mirror leads with a story about public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam's driver being transferred after showing up in a suit instead of his uniform on the day Ajmal Kasab was sentenced to death.
Forget the driver for a second, here's my question: why are people offering bouquets to the prosecutor? As far as Kasab himself was concerned, I have never heard of a more open and shut case in my life. The guy was caught on CCTV cameras shooting at people, clicked by a news photographer up close, and seen by over a dozen people who lived to testify about his actions. Plus he was captured quite literally red-handed at the end of his trail of murder. It would have taken a feat of incompetence beyond even the capacity of our police force to botch that argument.
There were, however, two persons charged with laying the groundwork for the terror attack who were tried along with Kasab. Both these gentlemen, Fahim Ansari and Sabahuddin Ahmed, were acquitted by judge Tahaliyani, who made deeply critical remarks about the investigation.
The response to the performance of Nikam and the policemen who briefed him is akin to cheering our cricket team for its showing in the T20 World Cup. It's true we lost to Australia, West Indies and Sri Lanka, but we did beat Afghanistan.

The David Headley case

Today's Times of India front page carries a report headlined, India irked by FBI caginess over Headley: ‘Why Didn’t They Tell Us When He Visited India In March?’
A sentence early in the article reads, "The growing disquiet in the government... was expressed by a senior official. 'It is very strange that the US did not inform us of Headley’s visit to India in March this year when, by their own account, he had been under their surveillance since at least September 2008,’' the official said, pointing out that India would have arrested the terrorist had it known about his identity."

Right there you have the probable reason why the FBI didn't inform India about the Headley case. The agency likely knew we'd do something idiotic like detaining the guy. Indian police have no notion of building a case before making an arrest. Our method is to arrest the suspect first, book him under a law that allows long detention without any framing of charges, torture him and extract a confession, then finally try and build a case from this confession and any corroborative evidence revealed during torture. In the end, more often than not, the case is thrown out in court and the suspect walks free. If he was innocent all along, he has served months in prison for no reason. If he was guilty, he's got off lightly.

I'm glad the FBI said nothing about Headley to anybody in India. Now there's a good chance the guy will actually get the punishment he deserves, presuming he did what he's been accused of doing.

News items that sounded like April Fool's jokes, but weren't

My last Fool's Day related post. Three stories from April 1 or thereabouts which could have passed for jokes.
Story 1: A researcher from Tabriz, Iran, has published a paper titled, 'Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males'. Sina Zarrintan suggests in the publication Medical Hypotheses that, since breathing problems during hayfever attacks are caused by inflamation of blood vessels in the nose, this might be countered by ejaculating, which leads to a constriction of blood vessels across the body. The neurologist has not studied his hypothesis on live subjects, but is convinced his treatment is preferable to prescribed decongestants, which, “if used for more than two or three days, can actually make congestion worse".
The dosage is adjustable, according to Zarrintan: "It can be done time-to-time to alleviate the congestion and the patient can adjust the number of intercourses or masturbations depending on the severity of the symptoms".

Story 2: A bank called up Bombay's Naresh Goomer to check if he had booked air tickets worth Rs.75,000 online in the recent past. When Goomer said he hadn't, the bank provided him with the name, mobile number and booking address of the passengers who had bought Bombay to Jaipur and Jaipur to Lucknow flights on Goomer's wife's credit card. Goomer took the information to the Juhu police, telling them they could intercept the culprits once they checked in at the airport. Instead, the police called the suspect's mobile number from the station's landline. Nobody answered. When the landline rang a few minutes later, the officer picked up the phone and said, "Juhu police station", at which point the caller hung up without saying a word. On being asked for his version of the story, Juhu senior police inspector Deepak Katkade said: "Investigations are going on and I cannot reveal the progress at this point of time. But we will definitely crack the case.''

Story 3: Sanjay Dutt has been made National General Secretary of the Samajwadi Party.

Complaining

Over fifty hours after Ramalinga Raju confessed to carrying out the biggest fraud in Indian corporate history, the police have yet to pop across to his house and question the man, let alone arrest him. They say they are waiting for a complaint. Funny thing is, anytime people arrange a party, cops land up at 11pm and inform the organisers that playing loud music isn't allowed after 10.30. Those who enquire if anyone's complained are informed rudely that the authorities can act even in the absence of complaints. Then negotiations start over the amount of cash or booze to be handed over before the partying can begin again.
I suppose Raju has sent negotiators to police headquarters in advance.