Filled with action-packed police drama, “Courageous”, made in 2011, is the fourth film produced by Sherwood Pictures. Courageous narrates the saga of four law enforcement officers who bravely confront the worst the streets offer. However, at home, they find they are falling short as Dads, as fat...
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The Scottish Physician and author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a forensic expert ahead of his time. The credit for unravelling tangled crime cases employing fingerprints, hair analysis and blood tests to decipher crimes belongs to him. If he were alive today, his ever-famous detective Sherlock Holmes ...
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Face recognition technology (FRT) has long been employed in science fiction flicks to depict a futuristic world of advanced technology. In the 1960s, "Star Trek" dazzled audiences demonstrating retina scans and facial recognition scans as a part of their digital security system. "Robocop," a 1987 Ho...
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Way back in the seventies, my cousin heaved me into a video arcade, exposing me to the virtual world for the first time. Once inside, I was blown away by the surreal ecosystem of flashing lights, eerie phantasmagorical sounds flaring off weirdly flickering lights and glinting game cabinets with shim...
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The campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT, M), is home for gazillions of flora and fauna. The biodiversity of which is simply mind-blowing. For me, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras campus is the most beautiful place to run in Chennai. I made this discovery running the C...
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“Contagion”, a 2011 film directed by Steven Soderbergh, witnessed a massive revival in popularity because of its stunning similarities with the current pandemic's onset. The film depicts an outbreak of a deadly virus and medical researchers' attempts worldwide to contain it. The movie mirrored t...
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In Watertown, Massachusetts, USA, on a warm, beautiful April day in 2013, Henneberry realised that something was awry when he decided to service his boat, which was straddling in the backyard of his house. Having mounted the ladder after plopping it on the flank of the boat, he saw blood and an obje...
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Of late terror threats have surged all over the world. Public places have become the favourite terror purlieu of the terrorists. Mass shootings have become a perpetual phenomenon; we have had more than 1700 mass shootings worldwide since 2015 because of the spurt in terrorism, increased tumult and u...
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The world today is under the clutch of a “Twindemic” of vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19. A twindemic is a portmanteau of “Twin” and “Pandemic”. Vitamin D deficiency is considerably under-diagnosed, and under-treated nutritional deficiency that is more pandemic than the Coronavirus toda...
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Voice-biometrics has been in existence in the realm of sci-fi movies for several decades, although in reality voice-biometrics has been around only in recent years. The 1968 Hollywood film In 2001: A Space Odyssey portrayed a computer named HAL 9000 that was shrewd enough to authenticate by voice, c...
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Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was one of the most outstanding leaders of our freedom struggle. Patel remained the treasurer of the Indian National Congress till his death. When it came to managing the funds, his honesty was unimpeachable. Commemorating his probity, the ‘Vigilance Awareness Week’ is o...
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In,1918 the Spanish Flu outbreak which took away the lives of 15 million Indians devastated India. When the flu made its way into India from abroad through the Bombay port, it first infected the seven police sepoys deployed at the Bombay docks forcing them to gain admission into the police hospital ...
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We have now reached the fourth and the final edition of the diet plan that details an easy to implement ten-step plan that helps one shed weight during a lockdown without having to step into a gym. To those who have not read the first three parts, this instalment will not make any sense. So please r...
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Welcome back to the third edition of the ten-step diet plan. A diet plan to help one lose weight during a lockdown in ten steps with no exercise. To those who have not read the first two parts, this instalment will not make any sense. So please revert to the first two editions either in the Deccan C...
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A law and order bundobust can get schemed and is, to a large extent, predictable, but a pandemic is entirely unpredictable. None or few people or few hundreds may die during a law and order situation, but thousands or millions could die in a pandemic. The worst flu pandemic in contemporary history w...
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Welcome back to the second instalment of the diet plan. To those who have not read the first instalment, the second part will make no sense. So please revert to the first part either in the Deccan Chronicle newspaper dated second April 2020 or check it out on my website @www.jayanthmurali.com. In...
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It's a pandemic time. Lock down's are in place in several countries. Bingeing during the pandemic is not just about Netflix. People are ploughing through the pandemic with portions and portions of food, as stress-eating and boredom are propelling them through their lockdown provisions, and making pe...
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It was daybreak, Saumitra and his friend were lazily strolling nearby the wooded areas in the periphery of their village when they came across a herd of elephants approximately 200 feet away. He could see roughly 15 or 16 of them, half juveniles and half adult females grazing the way they do, rippin...
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RoboCop released in 1987 tells the story of a Detroit police officer Alex Murphy killed in action and resurrected as a cyborg super-cop with a built-in program to restore law and order. Today science fiction has become a reality. Police in different parts of the world is using robots for law enforce...
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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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The Hrithik Roshan-Kangana Ranaut episode turned cyberstalking into a widely discussed national topic. In 2016, Hrithik filed a lawsuit against his Krrish 3 co-star Kangana Ranaut, charging her of cyberstalking and harassment. Refuting the charges, Ranaut filed a countersuit against Roshan, contendi...
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A 2007 American action thriller film ”Live Free or Die Hard” penned by John Carlin and directed by Len Wiseman had Bruce Willis portraying the character of John McClane. In the movie, McClane thwarts the cyber-terrorists who conspire to hack into government and commercial computers across the Un...
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Movies have prophesied some far-fetched things that have unbelievably come true. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), foresaw video calls and Siri-like artificial intelligence. It also anticipated space tourism, on which Richard Branson and Elon Musk are working. Ridley Scott’s “Blad...
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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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We all love RoboCop. Exoskeletons are a perfect example where technology is getting pretty close to the movies. The armour and cyborgian capabilities of exoskeletons are pretty freaking awesome. The exoskeletons give the characters extraordinary abilities to take on the supervillains of the world. W...
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Evidence-Based Policing (EBP) is a technique of formulating policy and tactical decision-making for police organisations. It is a practice of steering and leading policing with the intention of using evidence not only to drive the systematic application of key strategies or tactics but also for test...
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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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In 1998, Vacaville, California, USA, had a string of eight robberies. The robber came to be labelled as Bandanna Bandit. The police were clueless. Crime Analyst Laura Bettencourt took to Geographic Information System (GIS) to identify the likely future targets and the days of his next hits. Based on...
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On a beautiful April day in 2013, Henneberry decided to check on his boat which was sitting in the backyard of his house in Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. He noticed that something was off his boat when he put his ladder on the side of the boat and climbed it. He noticed blood and something which ...
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Bradley Waldroup lived in a camper home in the cliffs of Tennessee. On October 16, 2006, when the police responded to a call and strode into his home, the entire place looked like a battlefield. There was blood every place, there was blood on the carpet, on the walls, even on the Bible Waldroup had ...
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In the movie “The 6th Day”, Adam Gibson played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is deterred from entering a prohibited area when a scanner rejects his thumbprint. A security guard leans to him inquiring if he can help, Schwarzenegger grabs the guard at gunpoint and whispers, “Yeah, you can stick your...
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In an episode of Law and order aired in 2006, a husband suspects his wife of having an affair. He drugs his wife and implants an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag under her skin and installs readers in the doorways of places she hangs out with her lover. When his suspicions of his wife get c...
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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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I awakened this morning to cloudy north-east monsoon skies and intermittent drizzle. My daughter was flying down from Mumbai after nearly three months. I knew the aircraft she was in would graze the dense clouds and pierce through them before touching down in the next twenty minutes. As I looked up ...
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Can a supermarket find out that a teen is pregnant even before her father gets to know it? It turns out that a father in Minneapolis discovered that his daughter was pregnant not from her but the local Target store. He made the discovery when Target began sending his daughter; coupons for baby cloth...
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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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Yesterday, after concluding a meeting I had with my officers in connection with a forthcoming VVIP visit, I suddenly realised that my mobile had gone missing. Instantly, a sense of panic ripped through me as though I had just lost a limb. I had encountered the same dread rise inside me every time my...
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During my early Superintendent of Police days, my sister, who lives in the USA presented me with a book written by Gary Zukav titled “The Seat of the Soul”. The book blew me away. Impatient to lay my hands on other books written by Zukav, I bought myself his first book, “The Dancing Wu Li M...
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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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Archana religiously exercised every day. She was a teetotaler and never smoked cigarettes. Being married to an influential bureaucrat, she took good care of herself. She always began her day with a green juice, ate clean and led a stress-free life. But her skin experienced frequent breakouts; It alw...
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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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Vincenzo Natali’s spine-tingling thriller, “Splice,” explores the ethical and scientific conundrums of synthetic biology where two rock-star scientists create a new synthetic life form by combining DNA from two different organisms. Just three weeks before the release of the film on 20 May 2010...
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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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The Quantum Computing is the use of quantum mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform a computation, while a Quantum Computer is one which performs such a computation, which can theoretically or physically be implemented. Thus, it is the area of study focused on developi...
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On March 18, 1977, the telephone rang at 5 pm as on earlier occasions at the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office from the same caller saying: “I’m the East Side Rapist and I have my next victim already stalked and you guys can’t catch me.” True to his word, the East Area Rapist raped his ne...
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“Is it possible for a computer to become human like?” We have seen a computer HAL 2000 speak fluent English, experience jealousy and do away with the spaceship crew to prevent its own termination in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In “Her” a 2013 science fiction films writ...
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