The Hollywood film ”Minority Report" is an action-detective thriller set in Washington D.C. in 2054, where police utilise ” pre-cogs” to arrest and convict criminals before they commit their crime. Precrime relies on the visions of three psychics or “pre-cogs” whose prognoses of future eve...
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Last six months, I was in a bad state of mind. My work had got me down, and I felt like I was on a roller coaster of emotions, I felt high when I was running, or writing my column or while I was painting but felt outright crappy and down at work. Every day after work, I dumped all the darkness engul...
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In March 2013, on a beautiful day Cassidy Marie Wolf, a 16-year-old American model and a beauty queen just crowned Miss Teen USA was leaning in her bedroom and gazing at her computer when an email popped up that contained a dozen naked pictures of her in her bedroom The sender of the mail deman...
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As the New Year hovers just around the corner, it’s time to reflect, take stock of the year past, and plan for the year ahead. Looking back on the year need not be about beating oneself up and evaluating what we could have done well but also about rejoicing because it’s too easy to dwell on setb...
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I have battled with spirituality my entire life. I believed there was some divine power. I felt this in my heart, but for a long time my rational mind was at odds with my heart. Although, I am not much of a religious man. I craved, a connection with a greater power. Strangely, somewhere along the ...
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Describing real-life scenes from Bengal famine Brigg’s, a British United Press New Delhi correspondent in a newspaper in September 1942 wrote: ’’At least 150 people are dying daily in Calcutta from starvation and the accompanying diseases of cholera and dysentery, ’’In a sunrise walk, I...
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Memories of the scene which I witnessed at Palar during my days as Assistant Superintendent of Salem, (Training) where five police personnel and 17 others laid down their lives on April 9, 1993, in one of forest-brigand Veerappan’s single-most massive killings is still raw in my mind. It consterna...
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“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins”. These words by the great libertarian, John Locke, ring right considering the contumacious conduct of large social media companies while operating in India, and their failure to submit to Indian law. Social media companies today enjoy a substantial global p...
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Is DNA profiling a truth machine? A gold standard? I always believed it to be so. Could there be anomalies? In 1998, two men abducted a woman at gunpoint raped her and tossed her into a nearby field. Five days after the attack, the victim while driving in her neighbourhood, recognises two men as her...
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In Dante’s Inferno, treachery is the ninth circle of Hell. The traffickers, users and abusers populating the human trafficking sites on the darknet where the vulnerable sections of humanity get betrayed in most perfidious ways would easily stack up for the tenth circle if Dante were to create one ...
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On a recent, hot August afternoon, the abode of Athi-Varadar was teeming with a continual flow of pilgrims, 73000 devotees had completed darshan, and several thousand were waiting in the queue. I was checking the deployment near the East Gopuram when a weak elderly woman struggling to push an old ma...
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As you are reading this newspaper, you may be partaking in a cyber-attack far away in another land another country totally oblivious to the role you are playing in it. This may seem like a plot to the latest Hollywood thriller, but it occurs every day in the world of cybercrime. At this minute, yo...
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The US government was the first to use blockchain technology to investigate and bring down a dark-web marketplace called the Silk Road, which sold drugs, weapons, and everything illicit on this planet. The blockchain also helped nail two corrupt investigators investigating the black-market site. Aut...
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Nenikikamen! Who would have thought one Greek word, uttered from the mouth of a dying man, as he lay sprawled on the ground in front of his countrymen, would have spurred the imaginations of men, living centuries after? Nobody would have ever imagined that the story of the first ‘Marathon’ runne...
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On July 19, 2015, in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, Samuel DuBose, an unarmed 43-year-old black rapper, got fatally shot by Ray Tensing, a 25-year-old white police officer of the University of Cincinnati, for a moving violation and failure to produce a driving licence. The Body Worn Camera (BWC) on Tensing ...
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India has witnessed a few massive crowdsourcing campaigns during the past few years. One of the most renowned campaigns was a design contest conducted by the Ministry of Finance to create a symbol for the rupee. The Government received thousands of entries, but the design submitted by Udaya Kumar Dh...
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What’s in a name? "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" enunciated Chief Justice Misra referring to William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet,during the 377 IPC verdict.In all probability, he implied that it doesn’t really matter, if someone is straight or gay, as all of us are in es...
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Speaking about the weather, Mark Twain wrote, everybody, talks about it, but nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. When it comes to corruption in our country, the situation is no different from what Mark Twain had to say about the weather. Corruption in India is a phenomenon that pervades...
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A 2004 American science-fiction film “The Day After Tomorrow” directed, and produced by Roland Emmerich highlights what the world would look like if the greenhouse effect and global warming continued under the onslaught of environmental crimes being perpetrated by humankind .The film's protagoni...
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In Neptune’s Brood a sci-fi novel by Charles Stross,set in AD 7000, Homo sapiens are extinct and all the characters are androids .In that part of the galaxy, interstellar money is entirely cryptocurrency which goes by the name of "bitcoin". If so ? Is that an indication that cryptocurrencies will ...
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Back in 2002, when I along with a batchmate of mine watched the flick “Minority Report” little did we envisage the possibility of the Orwellian 2054 setting, dawning on us, so fast so soon. It’s been only 16 years since Steven Spielberg’s movie was released, but anyone revisiting the film wo...
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Fifteen cronies who have known each other since school have bunched-up for a party at a beach house off the ECR road, Bala their favourite Psychonaut host, plucks at a bag of heroin, and sets forth, to cut it into lines at the table. He snorts a line of heroin and another of MDMA. Other cronies stri...
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Sixty-six-year-old Anup Jalota’s headline-making affair with a 28-year-old Jasleen Matharu might have been a dupery stage-managed to have viewers hooked to “ Big Boss 12”. But what do you think when an everyday 80-year-old wealthy man weds a drop-dead gorgeous 22-year-old girl? Is it not plain...
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Back in 2002, I saw “Minority Report” a sci-fi film in which, Tom Cruise flings stuff blithely into translucent screens using gestures to get displays of information in his field of vision. When he strolls down the mall he’s bombarded with ads mentioning his name, by specific AR “Augment...
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My very first experience of a virtual world, came about during my high school days when my cousin tugged me to a video arcade. The bizarre ecosystem of shimmering game cabinets, flickering lights and phantasmagoric sounds of the arcade simply blew my mind away. For 50 paise at a time , I yanked on ...
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There is, of late, a revival of interest in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, just a couple of days ago, the world's tallest statue having a height of 182 metres, the “Statue of Unity “, befitting the leader got unveiled. Back in my school days, I found myself enraptured when my fifth class Anglo-Indian...
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My biology teacher in school taught me that a drone meant a male bee without stingers which did not gather nectar or pollen but simply existed to copulate with the unfertilised queen. Fast forward to today, the real male-bees in the bee-hives suddenly appear to have got drowned and stifled in the di...
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God does not discriminate between genders, who are we to do so? Enunciating so, the Honourable Chief Justice of Supreme Court, heading a five bench constitution bench, flung open the doors of Sabarimala temple to women of menstruating age. The looming retirement of Lordship Dipak Misra has spurred a...
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DNA was discovered as the genetic material by Oswald Avery and his associates in 1944 but it took 44 years for it to become admissible as evidence in the courts. Would the brain fingerprinting technology become admissible in our courts or would it be junked as a junk science? Only time will be able ...
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Third degree has travelled quite a long way from being an intensive qualifying examination for a member in Freemasonry to become eligible for Masonic meetings to a brutal and ruthless method of interrogation routinely being employed by police all over the world to elicit information from suspects. A...
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I have always been fascinated by detective movies and serials. For a few years, I have been watching American Television series “Forensic Files”. Not surprisingly, the recurring theme in almost all of them invariably has been about, the DNA molecule’s stellar role in solving crimes. India with...
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If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were to be alive today , the famous detective Sherlock Holmes created by him, who was credited for being a paradigmatic forensic expert for utilising fingerprints, hairs and blood samples to solve crimes would have prodigiously cracked most of the complicated crime cases us...
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People do not understand the complexities and constraints under which the Indian Police discharge their duties. A deliberate attempt is being made to muddy the waters and shift the blame for lynchings on to the police by alleging that the police at the behest of their political masters are shirkin...
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When I joined the Indian Police Service in 1991, there was no internet and therefore no type of cyber crime. Had anyone uttered the word cyber crime or Whats app back then, I would have mistaken it to be science fiction. Fast forward to today, the Internet has become ubiquitous and omnipresent. It n...
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In Chennai, Constable Mr Arun Raj of Armed Reserve, and Sub Inspector Mr Satish Kumar of Ayanavaram Police station, who blew their brains with their guns recently in two separate incidents, should have felt something akin to a 9/11 situation of being trapped and engulfed in a towering inferno of a g...
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Military and political leaders have known for long the importance of a good story with basic truth. They have in fact used the narrative as a weapon since beginning of history. A true story is undoubtedly the most powerful tool in the world. If one can control and manipulate the text, the story in t...
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In my childhood whenever we went for a movie, we knew we had to stand up when the national anthem would be played at the beginning of the movie, whether or not it made one feel proud, patriotic or emotional. It was a ritual which was religiously followed in 1970s and 1980s at least in Tamilnadu, wit...
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