But it’s worrisome the kind of corruption that your cops had back then. Do you guys still though, probably not, at least not the way it’s been depicted in this film… because that IS exactly the way it probably is over here… from what you get to read about in the papers, or hear about from people, people who’ve lived here their whole lives and know the place much better than you do.
Extortion, Abuse, Beatings, Extrajudicial killings—it’s all here… sometimes, it’s like I’m living in the wild-wild west all of a sudden. And they’ve coined up such a nice nick-name for it—Extra Judicial Killings—now become “encounter killings”—whenever the police are supposedly attacked by [armed assailants, like these] they are then FORCED to fire back at them—hey, he was asking for it, after all.
I of course have no personal knowledge of how bad it is, since the only time when I had an altercation with the cops was when I’d actually been taken to the police station when a guy who’d jumped the signal had run into me and crashed my bike while trying to catch the bus in front. So I grabbed a hold of the guy, and told him that he’d now have to explain to my Father that the money he’d just spent buying me the damn thing, was doing on the ground, lying on the asphalt all busted up.
The mistake that I made over here was that I’d caught the guy using a trick that one of my cousins had shown me… to hold a person by the back of his pants—then he can’t go anywhere, cos if you use the shirt, he might be tempted to get that off and run away… now, this happened to be the same technique that the police used, and there was a guy (a hawaldar you call him here: a non commissioned officer) watching me do this, and he just went over to the guy and whispered into his ear: just agree to whatever I’m saying ((my cousin translated that to me from the telegu, the local dialect here, that he was speaking in))
Well, my dad and my cousin had already arrived there by that time, and just wanted to take me home; they could care less about the bike, but the hawaldar, duty bound cop that he was, insisted that we go to the police station first which was just a stones throw away… now, I don’t know how many of you have been Unlucky enough to see the inside of an Indian Jail, or any jail for that matter, but it was my first time actually stepping into one…
The place was dark and dank, my god, and the cell area was pitch black… I was only 16/17 at the time, and this was my first time being in prison, and they had the guy who’d run into me and made me crash my bike file a report against me—to which the inspector who was there said I’d have to be kept for the night in lock-up for now—to which my father just exploded, and went over to the inspector’s desk and slammed his fist onto his register as hard as he could, and demanded that he let me out. So the guy just ended up by taking my name down and releasing me.
My cousin, on the way back home later told me that it must’ve been the first time that the cop ever saw someone slam his desk like that, or if he had seen it then the guy doing it must’ve had some serious political clout, which my father didn’t, so we were just lucky to get out of there in one piece.
