I was at Indian Express when the Tarun Tejpal story broke in 2013, and the detail that stunned me the most was what his team did in its immediate aftermath. Within days of the allegations surfacing, photographs started circulating among newsrooms, images of the survivor smiling, looking composed, going about her day at the same event where she says she had just been assaulted in a hotel elevator. The message those photographs were built to carry didn’t need a caption. “If she can smile like that, how bad could it really have been?”

Enough and more has been said about this after Tejpal’s conviction eartlier this month. But we need to remember that the tactic wasn’t invented for Tejpal, and it didn’t retire with him either. What his team did in 2013 is a single, well-documented instance of a much older and much wider playbook that Indian public life runs on whenever a survivor speaks up, and it’s worth naming the playbook itself rather than treating each case as its own isolated ugliness.

Shraddha Walkar’s case is the one that shows how far this playbook is willing to go, because in her case, the mud started arriving after she was already dead. Walkar was murdered by her live-in partner in Delhi in 2022, in a killing that involved documented, repeated abuse she had reported to police years before it happened. She had barely 120 followers on Instagram while she was alive. In the weeks after her death made national news, that number crossed five thousand, and her account filled with strangers explaining, to a woman who could no longer read any of it, exactly what she had done to deserve dying. Thousands of comments piled onto her final post alone, a large share of them variations on the same theme: that she had defied her parents, that she had no business being in a live-in relationship, that the relationship crossed religious lines and that was really the point. A sitting Union minister made a public statement in the same spirit, framing the murder as a lesson for “educated girls” who leave home for relationships their families haven’t approved. Nobody posting those comments was arguing about evidence or asking what actually happened inside that apartment. They were relitigating her right to have made the choices she made, on a dead woman’s own page, as though her body being found in pieces was itself proof that she’d had it coming for the crime of choosing her own partner.

A doctor in Jammu who filed sexual harassment allegations against a senior health department official found herself fighting a second battle almost immediately, this one waged in public rather than in a courtroom. Doctors’ associations issued statements branding her complaint baseless and frivolous. Officials within the very grievance system meant to protect her posted on social media questioning her credibility. She said it herself, plainly: she was being shamed despite being the victim. The mechanism here isn’t photographs, it’s institutional weight, an entire professional body closing ranks around the accused before any inquiry had run its course, using the language of due process to do something that had nothing to do with due process.

Varnika Kundu’s case shows how long this kind of character assault can keep working, and how it can resurface years after the original incident. She was stalked and chased through Chandigarh in 2017 by the son of a state politician, and she went public immediately, refusing the silence that’s usually the expected response. The case became a national conversation about women’s safety, and it should have ended there, as a straightforward account of a young woman doing the harder thing. Instead, in 2025, the accused was briefly appointed to a government legal post, a decision that only made sense if his conduct in that case had been quietly reclassified, in someone’s mind, as a footnote rather than a fact. The mud here wasn’t thrown directly at her. It was thrown at the seriousness of what happened to her, diluted slowly enough that eight years later, a government felt comfortable rewarding the man who did it.

Even the legal system’s own tools get repurposed for this. Rape trials in India are supposed to be conducted in camera specifically to protect a survivor’s privacy, a protection built entirely around her interests. In a widely reported Kerala case involving a well-known actor accused of orchestrating an assault, the accused invoked those same in-camera provisions to seek a gag order against media coverage, arguing that continued reporting damaged his reputation and his right to a fair trial. A safeguard written to shield survivors from public exposure became, in his hands, a shield for the accused’s public image instead. The law didn’t change. Who it was pointed at did.

The pattern is obvious and self explanatory. It is never actually about the incident itself. It’s about generating just enough public doubt, just enough reasonable-sounding distraction, fast enough that the distraction is already doing its work before anyone gets near a courtroom, an inquiry committee, or in some cases, before anyone in power even has to make a decision. Professional bodies issue statements. Institutions post on social media. Governments make appointments. Legal tools built for one purpose get flipped to serve the opposite one. None of it requires the accused to prove anything. It only requires the rest of us to already be primed to look for a reason to doubt her, which, depressingly often, we are.

What is ultimately comes down to is this: A society doesn’t have to consciously decide to make itself unsafe for survivors to speak. It just has to keep responding to that first wave of mud with curiosity instead of suspicion, has to keep asking what she was wearing, why she stayed, why she smiled, why she chose that relationship, instead of asking why so many separate, unconnected people, across so many separate, unconnected cases, all reached for exactly the same tactic the moment a woman was harmed. That question answers itself. They reach for it because it has worked before, on someone else, in a different case entirely, and it worked so well that thousands of strangers were still willing to use it on a woman who was no longer alive to hear it.

Rohit Sakya was arrested earlier this month by the Surat Cyber Crime Police at a hotel in Kanpur, where he had gone to meet his girlfriend. He is 18 years old, a Class 11 dropout from Kasganj, Uttar Pradesh, and by the time investigators caught up with him, he had allegedly built 121 AI-powered malicious APK files that had reached 21,672 phones across the country.

For as long as Indian cybersecurity conversations have discussed the teenage hacker, he has lived somewhere else. Kevin Mitnick was 15 when he first broke into a computer network in the United States. Lapsus$, the group that breached Microsoft, Nvidia, Rockstar Games and Samsung inside a single year, was run by a 17-year-old from Oxford, with a 16-year-old member arrested separately in Brazil. The 20-year-old identified earlier this year in INTERPOL’s Operation First Light, who laundered $122.5 million from romance scam victims through cryptocurrency, fit the same mould: young, self-taught, running an operation at a scale that would have needed an entire specialist team a decade ago.

Every time one of these stories broke, the reaction here settled into the same quiet reassurance. Remarkable. Alarming. Not something we are dealing with.

Sakya taught himself to build malware-infected Android APKs off YouTube tutorials and AI tools. He built 121 fake banking applications, one of them a convincing replica of the PNB One app, and sold them to cybercriminal syndicates on a subscription model priced at Rs 15,000 per APK. Forensic analysis traced those apps to 21,672 installs. The fraud linked to his work runs to Rs 65 crore, and includes a Surat resident who lost Rs 5 lakh to what he believed was his own bank’s official app. None of this required a dark web forum, a paid toolkit, or years of technical apprenticeship. It required the same platforms people use to learn cooking and graphic design. The barrier to entry that used to separate a curious teenager from a functioning malware business has effectively disappeared, and it disappeared in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, not in a server farm abroad.

What ended his run, though, had nothing to do with any of that. He was not undone by a smarter algorithm or a sharper piece of forensic software. He was undone the way people who don’t want to be found have always been undone: someone found out who he loved, and waited.

In 1982, Mumbai police tracked Manya Surve, then the city’s most wanted gangster, a man the underworld itself feared, to a beauty parlour in Wadala, because they knew he was coming to pick up his girlfriend. He stepped out of the taxi reaching for his revolver and never got the chance to use it. It became the city’s first recorded police encounter. Two decades later and a continent away, Jeffrey Manchester, a former Army Ranger who had robbed nearly 40 McDonald’s outlets across nine American states, escaped a maximum-security prison in North Carolina and spent six months hiding inside a Toys R Us, building an entire second identity around a woman he’d fallen for on the outside. He chose her birthday dinner over caution. Police were waiting there too.

Three crimes with nothing in common. Two continents, four decades, tools that share no lineage whatsoever, from a country-made revolver to a prison break to an AI-generated APK. And the exact same failure point closing every one of them.

This part of the Sakya story is easy to file under colour and move past, but it’s actually the more useful half of the case. Indian cybersecurity has spent the last several years, correctly, arguing that the country needs to catch up technically: better forensics, better threat intelligence, models trained to detect AI-generated malware before it reaches a subscription network like the one Sakya was allegedly running. Nothing about that argument gets weaker after this arrest. If anything, a Class 11 dropout building 121 working banking-fraud apps off YouTube tutorials is the strongest case yet for taking the technical threat seriously, because it proves the barrier to entry has fallen further and faster than most of the conversation has caught up to.

But it would be a mistake to read that as the whole lesson. The instinct that put officers outside a beauty parlour in Wadala in 1982 is not obsolete just because the criminal now works in Kotlin instead of a country-made pistol. It’s the same instinct that can put investigators inside the Telegram channels and WhatsApp groups where subscription malware gets bought and sold, watching for the same human patterns that gave up Surve in a taxi and Manchester at a birthday dinner. Every one of these men had automated, escaped, or encrypted his way past whatever technical defence stood in front of him. None of them could route around the fact that he still wanted to see someone he loved.

The honest position isn’t old methods over new ones, or the reverse. It’s that a cybercrime unit built entirely around reverse-engineering the next APK will still be two steps behind a hotel room in Kanpur, and a unit that relies only on informants and surveillance will miss the next Sakya before he ever gets close enough to be tailed. The threat has gone fully global and fully democratised. The way you close in on the person behind it has stayed exactly the same for forty years. Both of those things are true at once, and treating either one as sufficient on its own is how the next case takes longer to close than this one did.

“Where’s Jadhav?” Senior Police Inspector Darshan Salunke thundered.

“He’s unwell, sir,” his orderly replied.

Salunke looked up from the extremely badly written Incident Report that Jadhav had turned in.

“Again?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the orderly, Bharat Shinde, said. Orderlies, over the years, master the art of survival like no one else. Offer nothing extra, attract no ire.

Salunke stormed out of his cabin, ignoring the hurried salutes that his subordinates struggled with, to the duty roster.

“How many people have called in sick, again?” he asked the Station House Officer.

“Five, sir.”

“And what are they suffering from?”

Severe acidity, diarrhea or both, sir.”

“Must be the water or something,” he said, walking back to his cabin.

The rest of the day went off normally. Salunke yelled at three errant officers and topped it off by punishing a fourth, Police Sub Inspector Sanjay Deshmukh, with an out-of-turn night shift.

Salunke didn’t think of Deshmukh till two days later, and yelled out for him, per his usual practice.

“He’s unwell, sir,” said his orderly. “Severely upset stomach.”

Salunke looked up, and then went over to the station house officer’s desk, checked the night duty roster and went back without saying a word.

That night, the night patrolling unit made a slow, lazy round through its beat for an hour, and then came to a stop outside Delhi Zaika, the best restaurant for Mughlai cuisine in the jurisdiction. Three boxes of mutton biryani were handed over to the cops. No money was paid, or even mentioned. The SUV was about to start again when there was a tap on the driver’s window. The constable looked to his side with irritation, and went ramrod erect to see Senior Police Inspector Darshan Salunke leaning against the door.

“I don’t want to make a thing out of this,” he told the trembling cop. “Tell everyone to stop eating free biryani and going to sleep in the vehicle immediately after that. It’s giving you people stomach problems and eating into my manpower”

Salunke walked away and no one called in sick after their night shift ever again.

(Based on a true incident from my crime reporting days)

A few years ago, at a family function, a relative was holding court on Priyanka Chopra. The gist of it was that she had “affairs with married men” before “running off to Hollywood when she couldn’t deal with the consequences.” I listened for a full ten minutes before finally asking, “The men knew they were married, right?” The relative didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the evening.

I was reminded of this incident last week, when the “Tabaahi” song from Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups released. The song features Kiara Advani and Yash in a set of intimate scenes, and within a day, social media was flooded with people asking how a married woman, and a mother at that, could agree to shoot something like this. Some dragged in her husband Sidharth Malhotra, wondering how he could “allow” it.

Plot twist: Yash is also married, and is also a father of two. He appears in the same scenes, doing the same work. Nobody has asked him a single one of these questions. Nobody has asked his wife’s opinion either. A day after the backlash, Kiara posted new stills on Instagram with a caption about leaving a little chaos wherever she goes, which read like someone who’d decided the question wasn’t worth a direct answer. She was right. It wasn’t. Queen behaviour.

The phenomenon is hardly new. In 2023, when Adipurush was in its promotional cycle, a section of social media decided that Kriti Sanon’s past filmography, roles where she’d danced and dressed the way commercial Hindi cinema has always asked its heroines to, rendered her unfit from playing Sita. Predictably, there was defeaning silence about Prabhas, cast opposite her as Lord Ram, who has done his share of films and songs on-screen drinking and womanising in merry abundance. Don’t believe me? Go to Google Images and search for ‘Prabhas film song.’ Doesn’t seem to have affected his qualifications to play the maryada purushottam.

There is one argument that comes in at a time like this; that such opinions are being aired now as bait, or “rage bait”, as they call it. The reason is that such takes invite the ire of the level headed and generate traction on social media posts. Particularly on Twitter, the more traction a post gets, the higher the chances of the user getting paid

I don’t disagree with this. But I am still unwilling to turn this into a discourse about the depths that one can sink for the purpose of engagement farming. That is a whole different conversation. What I have noted, with increasing amusement, in society is how the morality of our moral police suddenly wakes up when there is a woman in the picture. Twitter or no twitter, the same society that feels nothing about burning women alive for dowry suddenly wants her to be a ‘devi’ for the sake of the ‘izzat’ of the ‘ghar’.

An example from 1995 comes to mind. Twitter hadn’t been dreamed of, and Elon Musk was, mercifully, nowhere on the horizon at the time. Supermodels Milind Soman and Madhu Sapre had posed nude together for a shoe advertisement, a python draped over both of them. The backlash that followed was not equal. Protestors turned up outside Sapre’s family home and handed her parents saris, telling them to make their “shameless daughter” cover up. Soman faced legal cases too, and an obscenity complaint was filed against the ad itself, but the public shaming machinery aimed itself almost entirely at her.

Twenty-five years later, on his fifty-fifth birthday, Soman posted a picture of himself running naked on a beach as a fitness statement, and the overwhelming public reaction was admiration. A political outfit in Goa did file a police complaint over it, which is worth noting for accuracy, but the dominant public mood treated it as an act of bold self-love from a man ageing well, not as a referendum on his character. The same body, exposed in public, in two different decades, earned one woman a visit from the morality police at her parents’ doorstep and one man a caption calling him a hottie. Imagine, for a second, Madhu Sapre doing a second photoshoot 25 years later.

Line up all four of these; the family function comment, the Toxic song, the Adipurush casting debate, the shoe ad, and the mentality is identical every time. It was never really about the nudity, the intimacy, or the mythological purity being defended. If any of that were the actual objection, it would fall on both people in the frame with equal weight. It never does. It conveniently finds the woman, and it finds a different justification. Depending on the decade, she’s a wife, a mother, a goddess or the sole keeper of the family’s honour.

You don’t need to be a genius to catch it happening. You just need to notice, every single time, who gets asked to answer for it, and who gets to walk out of it clean.

The year was 2008 and I had just joined the Asian Age as a trainee crime reporter. These were the days before internet-enabled smartphones became a thing, so every newspaper had one reporter on the late night shift, in case something big broke. It was my turn on the late night shift that night and, as it turned out, something big did break.

The initial tip-off that came in was that a body cut into several pieces had been found outside a plush members-only club in south-central Mumbai. My photographer and I rushed to the scene and by the time we got there, the scene was mildly chaotic. Police vehicles were strewn about, an ambulance stood in the middle of it, onlookers were craning their necks. traffic cops were clearing backed up vehicles with hand-gestures and abuses, and a constable waved his stick at me, but spotted my Press ID in time.

I smelled the body long before I saw it, because it had been cut into five pieces and decomposition had set in. A couple of young men from the morgue were piecing it together, right there on the pavement outside the club. Once they were satisfied that they had the whole body, they wrapped it tightly in a white cloth sheet and carried it to the ambulance. I caught one of them as he was walking back from the ambulance. He was visibly swaying and I was cocky enough to believe that I had seen something that nobody else had.

“You’re drunk, aren’t you?” I asked him, feeling quite smart for spotting it.

The boy looked me dead in the eye and said, “You try touching a dead body while sober.”

I mutely turned back to the job at hand, jotted down all details from the officer who briefed the press and turned in a report based on whatever basic information was available before the edition deadline.

I went home thinking that some dreaded serial killer with a twisted mind had struck, and that the case was going to get even more interesting in the days to come. The spot where the bodies were found was also significant: it was a members-only club where many of the city’s elite came every day for a quiet evening with friends or family. Was this a message? Was this something else?

The case did get interesting, but not in the way I had thought.

In less than a week , the police arrested three accused for the murder. The story that came out was this: The deceased and the accused were all daily wage labourers, who shared a room and often worked together. The deceased was a sincere young man who would save his earnings and send money home every weekend. The other three were drug addicts who would spend all their wages on street smack and then pester the deceased for money.

One evening, the pestering turned more forceful and soon escalated into a brawl, where the trio ended up killing their roommate. The intention, they would later tell the police, was never to kill but they ended up bashing his head in and panicked. Survival instinct kicked in and they spent the night chopping up the body and stuffing the parts in suitcases. They then cleaned up the blood, waited for the next evening and left with the suitcases. At the first possible opportunity, they abandoned the bags on the sidewalk, which turned out to be outside the plush, members-only club.

The story taught me that anyone is capable of murder. The three killers were not criminal masterminds, devil worshippers or terrorists. They were young men in their twenties, working back-breaking jobs for crappy pay, and addicted to cheap drugs. And they ended up killing a man, and went on to dismember the corpse. The murder wasn’t premeditated. It was, in the truest sense of the word, a crime of passion. They had attacked the victim with the intention of teaching him a lesson, and ended up killing him. Even the disposal of the body wasn’t preplanned. It was sheer survival instinct. Faced with the situation of having a dead body in their hands, they did everything they thought was necessary to escape punishment for their actions.

In many ways, crime reporting is a study of human psychology. In my 16 years of crime reporting, I have murders being committed over the wildest of reasons. In most of these cases, the murderers are ‘normal’ people with ‘normal’ lives, till the moment they take a life.

This picture is of me on a work call, taken the same morning I told a colleague I used to be socially anxious and an introvert. She refused to believe it, and it set off a chain of thoughts I am now putting down in writing.

I grew up a loner. I’ve never been a sports person. I hate watching sports, leave alone playing any, unless FIFA on the computer counts. Cricket was the currency of friendship where I grew up. Boys bonded over gully matches after school, planned their weekends around watching India play, and spent hours arguing about who should open the batting.

I had nothing to add to any of it. I couldn’t tell a googly from a full toss, and I never cared to learn. School trips to watch a match at the stadium meant sitting through hours of a game I didn’t follow, surrounded by classmates who understood every ball of it. I wasn’t part of any groups or clubs in school and college either. I went from being a shy child to a socially awkward teenager, the kind who stood at the edge of every gathering and counted the minutes until it was over.

School offers a kind of shelter without you ever noticing it. You’re surrounded by the same faces for years, and nobody expects you to introduce yourself twice. College took that shelter away overnight. There was no fixed classroom to sit in every day, no set group of classmates assigned to you by circumstance. Every relationship now had to be built from scratch, with strangers, through my own effort, and that was a lot to ask of someone who had spent twelve years not needing to make one.

The trouble with this situation is that the peer pressure around you to fit in is so intense that you end up jumping in the deep end. I did too. From next to no interaction, I tried becoming the cool guy who mixed and laughed and hung out with everyone, and only ended up coming across as a huge wannabe and, therefore, an outcast. I remember rehearsing how to greet people before walking into a room, and still getting it wrong.

To everyone’s surprise, most of all my own, I took up journalism as a career; a job that required going out into the field every day, talking to people, chatting up strangers, calling government servants of every rank and temperament, and doing all of that over and over again, day after day, for years.

That job offered none of the buffers I had built for myself. There was no picking who to talk to and who to avoid. A crime beat means speaking to a grieving family in one hour and an evasive police officer in the next, coaxing a reluctant source into trusting you enough to go on record, convincing a bureaucrat who has nothing to gain from the conversation to spare you five minutes, and then doing it all over again with someone else entirely, in a different tone, for a different story, the same day. Every interaction demanded its own register, its own opening line, its own way of putting a stranger at ease, and none of it came with a script beyond the one I wrote for myself on the fly.

Was it easy? Absolutely not.

I’d rehearse a call in my head a hundred times before I dialled a number. I’d script out how I would introduce myself, guess at how the other person might react, and keep a second and third way of asking the same question ready in case the first one didn’t land. Meeting people and building rapport would take so much out of me that I’d be out of stamina by evening. I still don’t have many friends outside my work circle, and that isn’t an accident.

Whatever mental stamina I had for talking to people got spent entirely on the job, and there was nothing left over by the time I was done for the day to go out, meet someone new, or even keep up with people I already knew. Socialising after work simply stopped being an option I had the energy for.

It’s only in the last three months that I’ve realised how much progress I’ve made on this front, and it took a career change to make it visible to me. Moving from journalism into a corporate role, from newsrooms and beat reporting into boardrooms and client meetings, put me back in unfamiliar rooms with unfamiliar stakes, and that discomfort sharpened something I’d been too busy to notice while I was still in journalism.

I interact with people easily now. I give sessions in front of large crowds, I network and liaise more comfortably, I hold my own in meetings with high-ranking officials, and I even crack jokes. And the jokes land.

What strikes me most is that this change was never brought about consciously. I don’t remember doing anything specific to improve the nature or quality of my interactions. I just kept doing what the job required, one call and one meeting at a time, until the discomfort wore thin from overuse.

Maybe the only thing I stopped doing was trying too hard, being a wannabe. Even that came automatically, as I accepted myself and grew comfortable with who I am.

Accepting that I can’t always be the coolest, smartest, funniest person in the room has to be one of the best gifts I ever gave myself, because my silences have increased the value of my conversations. There’s a joy in listening too, in noticing what a good point the other person has made, in letting them hold the floor without needing to fill it myself.

And over the years, as I kept at it, it got easier.

So if you are an introvert or a loner or socially anxious or all of the above, this is my suggestion to you: Stop trying too hard. It will flow. It will happen. You will do it. And it will get easier.

Let go. And fly.

For the purpose of this story, we shall call our survivor Arsh.

Arsh is nearly 30 years old, the son of divorced parents.

Arsh and his mother have, over the last two decades, tried to build a life for themselves. It’s not been easy and their own relationship has been strained as they’ve battled their respective traumas and tried to be a family at the same time.

Arsh still considers himself luckier than others in his position, in the sense that he has been exposed to the right things, like mental health and trauma awareness. Over the years, he has sought help, been to therapy, worked on himself and is generally a healthier person. As a result, he believes that everyone has it in them to be their best version, given the chance. And it is due to this belief that Arsh, in a moment of vulnerability that he thinks he can show with his mother, blurts out a dark truth.

It comes out in a burst during an argument. It is not even a fully coherent sentence at first. But the gist is quite clear; his father used to molest him when he was a kid.

It is important to understand here that Arsh comes from a place of awareness and education. He has read a lot about how to deal with victims or survivors of abuse, interacted with therapists, seen documentaries and so on and so forth. This has been part of his own healing journey, and in the process, he has become acquainted with what happens to the family of a survivor as well.

Hence, he knows that something like this will shatter his mother, and he is prepared for shock, denial and grief.

What he is not prepared for are the words that come out of her mouth.

“Did you encourage him in any way?” she asks.

And just like that, Arsh’s world comes crashing down around him.

*********

Three months have passed. In these three months, Arsh has had breakdowns, showdowns, relapses into an addiction he thought he had left far behind, walked out of the house, stayed with friends and then come back again.

The initial shock of his revelation has given way to anger from his mother, and all of it was directed at him. Then came more blaming and more shaming as his mother desperately tried to save the last frayed threads of the picture she had in her mind. The picture of a happy marriage as she had convinced herself. For a while, she would tell herself, it was good, before it went bad. The fact that it went bad long before she realised it is not something she can accept at her age.

She has tried. She asked the details, asked how she never knew about it. But it didn’t take long for the conversation to veer to how he should have told her sooner, and how he has added to her woes by telling her now. Arsh gives up after the first few times.

Now, an uneasy silence hangs in the air. Father is never mentioned. Arsh and his mother try to mend their broken relationship with extra love and attention towards each other. Both of them try in their own way, and both of them succeed in their own way as well.

Till, once in a while, his father calls for some reason or the other. Then, the funereal atmosphere returns. And it stays for days.

**********

“You going to wish him?” the words escape her mouth before she realises what she is saying. It is Arsh’s father’s birthday today. And she has mentioned it casually without realizing that the rules have changed now.

This is a moment for damage control, a moment to show sensitivity. All Arsh wants in this moment is for her to admit she was wrong and that she needs to be more mindful.

But pride takes over. For far too long, she has been the victim in the equation, the victim of a bad marriage and hence the one who has suffered the most. This is a title she is not ready to give up yet, least of all to the same person she has emotionally blackmailed all her life using her inflated sense of victimhood. So she says nothing. She walks away.

It is now up to Arsh to regulate his reactions, to clench his fist till the feeling of anger passes every time his father’s name comes up, to be the bigger person, to ‘understand’, because his mother has been through so much. It is up to Arsh now to act like nothing happened, like things are completely normal between him and his father, and to see his mother take refuge in the charade despite knowing the truth.

It is like there has been a death in the family, and everyone is trying to honour the memory of the deceased by saying great things about him.

Arsh has no idea why he feels like he is the murderer.

“A son can be a bad son, but a mother can never be a bad mother”

The above inscription in Marathi was put up prominently on the wall of my friend Sujeet’s living room. I looked at it for several seconds, reading but not digesting, before I turned to him. Before I could ask for an explanation, however, his mother’s voice rang out from the kitchen.

“Help your mother, won’t you!”

Sujeet sprang out of his seat and ran to the kitchen to help her with the tea and snacks, and came out bearing a tray a few minutes later. I was in the house for around three hours that day, and during that time, the word “your mother” was thrown at Sujeet at least 20 times, if not more. Every small or big thing that his mother wanted him to do or say, it always came out in the form of “do this for your mother.” The not-so-subtle reminder that he had some kind of sacred duty towards his mother was tossed at him at every available opportunity and, in my opinion, in some places where it was completely inapplicable.

I also learned that Sujeet, who worked a gruelling nine-to-five job, woke up early every day to make breakfast for himself and tea and breakfast for her, did the laundry and swept the house before leaving, and did the dishes and finished other sundry chores after he came home from work.

“This much he should do for his mother, no?” Sujeet’s mother said, smiling.

I gently broached the subject of a maid, and it was kicked out of the field before it could even land.

“Maids are lazy nowadays! And who will keep an eye over them every day! This boy is always in office. No time for the house, I tell you.”

Before I could say anything, the next sentence came rushing out.

“I keep telling him to get married. At least there will be someone to share his load.”

Six months later, Sujeet told me he was getting married. It was an arranged marriage. I asked him if he was happy and his answer was, “Mummy is happy.”

I tried reasoning with him, tried to make him see that he had to put himself first, at least with the biggest decision of his life. But he didn’t. And within nine months, he was divorced. That was a year ago. Sujeet still lives under the guilt of “not being able to sustain a marriage and disappointing Mummy.”

The Siya Goyal case, which broke just days ago, is perhaps the most extreme illustration of where this kind of pressure can ultimately lead. Siya was barely 19 when the marriage proposal from Ketan Agarwal’s family first arrived. She was allegedly in a relationship with another man and, according to police, had made clear through her behaviour that she was not ready for this marriage. The families, however, were deep into wedding preparations by the time any of that came to light. A palace in Rajasthan had been booked, private aircraft had been arranged for guests, Rs 50,000 had been spent on shopping for the bride, and a November wedding date had been fixed.

Police now suspect that Siya was under sustained family pressure to go through with the marriage regardless of her own emotional state or personal relationships. A senior investigating officer stated plainly that she was “not mentally prepared for marriage and was under pressure from her family to accept the proposal.” Siya’s parents have said they asked her multiple times whether she liked Ketan and received assurances that she was happy. Her mother pointed to the wedding preparations as proof: “If she did not want the marriage, why would we have continued making all these preparations?” This is the same script that plays out in drawing rooms across India. The asking is performative. The child learns quickly what answer is expected of them, and the machinery does not stop for a no.

What happened at Lohagad Fort is, without question, a crime. A man is dead, a family is shattered, and nothing about the pressure Siya was allegedly under can justify what police say she did. But the case forces an uncomfortable question that this country has consistently refused to engage with honestly: what does years of unyielding family pressure do to a young person who sees no legitimate way out? When children are raised to believe their own desires are secondary to family honour, when declining a marriage is treated as betrayal rather than self-determination, when the entire social architecture insists that parents always know best, what happens when the one taking all that pressure finally cracks?

Countless idioms and verses in Indian culture accord a Godlike status to parents. Like any other Indian child, I grew up believing in them firmly. But then, I became a crime reporter. And over the next 16 years, I saw parents do things to their children that no God would do, even in the darkest of folk tales.

It wasn’t just the physical crimes. They were bad enough when parents assaulted their children, mistreated them or killed them. Yes, a lot of that had to do with postpartum depression, and like every other issue connected to mental health, our approach is to just deny its existence.

There are also cases of sexual abuse, where fathers have abused their daughters and their sons. Or the cases where parents have covered up the cases of their own children being abused because of “what will society say?”

But the worst have always been the instances of subtle psychological abuse. The constant reminders of how infallible parents are, the guilt-tripping over “how much we have done for you”, the playing of the parent card ever time the child stepped out of line. And before you point it out, yes, this is faced by sons and daughters alike. I am not comparing here, nor am I trying to say that one category has it harder than the others.

But across India, children are trapped in loveless, toxic relationships with their parents, bogged down under the guilt that comes with being born to Gods. They navigate their daily life while jumping over minefields that manifest in many forms; parents can do no wrong, parents know better because they’re older, parents can never be wrong, parents have done so much for us, parents deserve to be priorities, parents are your first duty…

But guess what, parents are human beings too. (Ironically, this is the first argument every child hears when they try to point out their parents’ mistakes. “We are only human, it is possible we may have made a mistake.”) And because they are human, so are their actions. First of all, we marry off our sons and daughters before they’ve fully grasped the concept of marriage. They are thrown into each other’s constant company when they are not ready for that kind of responsibility. The moment they tie the knot, we start pressurising them into having children, which means people who were not ready to be spouses in the first place are now becoming parents when they are not ready for it. Obviously, mistakes will be made while navigating this responsibility. Only, with something as important as parenting, it is the child who bears the consequences of the mistakes.

These consequences manifest in many forms. Depression, anxiety, imposter syndrome, anger outbursts, addictions, self harm… this list, too, is endless. But here’s the tricky part: parents can never be held responsible for causing such damage to their children, because parents are God. So, it ends up being portrayed as the child’s fault. Depression? Just stay away from negativity. Anxiety? You need to be strong. Addictions? You’re in bad company. There is always a perfectly convenient reason for the child’s troubles, and mostly it is the child’s fault and the parents are victims. Again.

As a result, there are Indians caught in the wrong jobs, unhappy marriages, living with their abusers and constantly bound by the obligations piled on them. And those who push against these obligations and try to opt for a healthier life are shamed. They’re bad sons and bad daughters.

Small wonder, then, that most of the current generation is speaking out strongly against generational trauma and parental abuse. They are, of course, labelled rebels, or worse. A large number of them move out as soon as they can, whether it is for studies or work. I have ex-students specifically looking for jobs far away from home. Thanks to the internet and the awareness around parent-child dynamics, children are now speaking out.

But this alone won’t suffice. Because the bullet-proof superiority of Indian parents is so deeply rooted in the country’s psyche that we have lost no time in spreading it around that ‘this generation is completely spoiled due to the internet’. The children are wrong, again. The parents are victim. Again.

So the next time you see a black sheep of the family, take them out for coffee and ask them their story. You’d be surprised.

In February 2023, a set of 3.1 crore datapoints of Indian citizens using the Rail Yatri app was put up for sale on the dark web. I was with Hindustan Times at the time and actively writing about cybersecurity by then. This was a story directly affecting Indians and the first thing I did was to ask some experts where I could find out more.

One of the experts sent me a link to a Telegram group in response. I was curious why and opened it, and the next thing I knew, I had joined the Telegram Channel of the Israeli hacker group that had claimed responsibility for the Rail Yatri hack. Over the next six hours, I DM-ed the admin, used their help to set up an interview with the head of the group, had an extensive chat with the head on Telegram, and also saw samples of the breached data.

I found myself thinking of the incident when the Indian government announced its decision to ban Telegram in India till July 22. The grounds for the ban were the cheating rackets were using Telegram channels to sell what they claimed were question papers for the NEET UG 2026 re-examination. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology invoked Section 69A of the IT Act, and just like that, the country’s most popular messaging platform for criminal activity was also temporarily unavailable to everyone who was using it entirely legitimately.

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, characteristically, went on Twitter to say that the ban had failed because the content had simply migrated to other apps. He wasn’t strictly wrong but he was also making the strongest possible case against his own platform’s conduct.

The entire debate around the Telegram ban has been framed as a question of proportionality. Did the government overreact? Is a platform responsible for what its users do on it? Should 150 million ordinary users be penalised for the actions of a few thousand bad actors? These are reasonable questions, and on a purely legal or civil liberties reading, the ban does look blunt and arguably disproportionate.

But that framing allows us to avoid a much more uncomfortable question: why was an emergency measure felt necessary in the first place?

A ban is, by definition, a fire alarm. It is a signal that something has already gone badly wrong, that the normal systems of prevention and detection have failed, and that the only tool left is to cut off access entirely. But fire alarms, like all alarms, do nothing about the conditions that allowed the fire to start. At some point, you have to examine the building.

Telegram was launched around 2013 and within a year, it became a hotbed for illegal activities. It is not the “new dark web” as some people are claiming. It has always been a mobile and user-friendly version of the dark web. In order to navigate the dark web via desktop computer, you need to install specific browsers and have some knowledge of how the whole system works. With Telegram, you just need to install the app. Practically every hacker group has a Telegram channel. Cybercriminal gang, too, prefer the app. In crypto frauds, the victims are lured to Telegram at the first available opportunity. In investment advice frauds, the victims are added to Telegram groups. Most cybercrimes today use Telegram for one purpose or another.

Why, then, should the onus only be on governments of the country where the damage is felt? The one entity in the best position to do something about the situation is Telegram itself. And all I see them doing is tweeting in criticism of the ban.

There is a concept that the technology industry has long resisted applying to itself but that every other industry takes for granted, and it is called security by design. The idea is simple. When you are constructing a building, you do not finish it and then wonder whether someone might fall off the scaffolding. You factor in fall points from the planning stage, you install safety nets and harnesses and guardrails, and you are personally and legally accountable if you do not. If a worker dies because you skipped that step, you do not get to say that workers should have been more careful. You get arrested.

Telegram’s founders built a structure with no safety nets and then expressed surprise, repeatedly, when people fell off. This is hardly incidental. It is a design outcome.

Consider what other industries have already done. Banks and credit card companies do not wait for fraud to be reported before they act. They have built behavioural analytics into the core of their operations. Transactions that deviate from a customer’s established pattern trigger alerts in real time. Accounts associated with suspicious activity are flagged before a single rupee disappears. Meta runs proactive intelligence operations to detect honeytrap accounts, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, misinformation networks, and fraud rings. It does not wait for users to report a fake account before it investigates. It looks for signals, anomalies, and behavioural patterns that suggest abuse, and it takes down millions of accounts proactively, before damage is done.

None of these systems read private conversations or access sensitive info. None of them require surveillance in any meaningful sense. They analyse behaviour, flag anomalies, and build friction into suspicious patterns. A public Telegram channel with “PAPER LEAKED NEET” in the name and tens of thousands of members joining in three days is not a privacy concern. It is a detection problem, and detection is an engineering choice that Telegram has consistently declined to make.

Telegram, until very recently, cooperated with law enforcement on practically nothing, citing user privacy as a principle of near-absolute standing. That position began to shift only after Pavel Durov was arrested in France in August 2024. In the months following his arrest, Telegram amended its privacy policy to disclose the mobile numbers and IP addresses of accounts flagged by law enforcement. This was treated in some quarters as a significant concession. It is actually the equivalent of installing a railing on the roof after someone has already fallen off seventeen floors.

What changed after Durov’s arrest is that Telegram agreed to respond faster when governments told it about specific accounts. What did not change is the underlying architecture. There is still no serious proactive detection capability and no meaningful friction for anyone building large-scale criminal infrastructure on the platform’s back.

To be clear: a blanket ban is not the answer either. But the fact that a blanket ban is like patching a bullet wound with a bandaid does not mean Telegram’s critics are wrong. An imperfect government response to a real problem is still a response to a real problem. And Durov’s instinct to frame this as government overreach against his users, while declining to seriously interrogate his own platform’s architecture, is exactly the kind of condescension that makes regulatory pressure inevitable.

The emergency measure was felt necessary because the ordinary safeguards were absent. And the ordinary safeguards were absent because Telegram chose to build a platform where the absence of safeguards was treated as a feature.

When you build a building, you are required by law to think about who might fall off and what you are going to do about it. That requirement exists not because every builder is assumed to be malicious, but because foreseeability carries obligation. Telegram has watched the same harms repeat themselves across a decade, on its own platform, in plain sight. That is a choice.

A couple of months ago, a young colleague and I were in Hyderabad for a work trip. We reached the airport fairly early for our flight back to Mumbai and were having dinner when he started talking about his family.

He is in his twenties, considers me something like an elder brother, and in the way that younger men sometimes do with older ones they trust, and in the natural course of the conversation, he started telling me about his father.

He told be how his father had made sure that they never lacked for anything growing up. But he had also instilled in his sons a healthy dislike of unnecessary spending, a sense that money was earned and therefore meant something. I focused on my biryani (it was Hyderabad, duh.) while he told me how he wants to be successful, not exactly for himself but as a way of saying thank you to his father, for everything.

I listened without begrudging him his moment. But the same moment also ignited in me a feeling that I did not immediately have a name for. I still don’t exactly have a word for it. The closest I can describe it is the feeling of missing the father I never had.

My earliest memory of my father is of him breaking my mother’s forearm. He could not be bothered to take her to a doctor afterwards, so it never healed properly. It hurt her for years, especially when the weather got cold. They divorced when I was so young that I had not yet started school. I grew up watching her struggle to keep the house running while also trying to keep herself together. And yet, as a child, all I wanted was my father. As a result, I buried that image of my father quite deep in my subconscious. It was only after years of unlearning, self awareness and therapy that I could even face the image.

My mother remarried when I was eleven. My stepfather was clearly not ready for fatherhood under any circumstances, much less for acquiring a readymade eleven-year-old son overnight. It showed, almost right from the beginning, but both my mother and I were not ready to confront that truth yet. We told ourselves that he needed time, and that he had done me a great favour by accepting me as his son. It took us years to realise that he never had accepted me. Much later, my mother told me that he once saw a birthmark on my body, and it was a constant reminder for him that I was not his flesh and blood.

But that would come later. For the moment, I kept overlooking his behaviour for years, until the day I saw him hit my mother and my world came crashing down around me all over again in a very familiar way.

The violence, though, was only one part of it.

My biological father was a philanderer and an alcoholic, who eventually married the woman who had broken up his marriage to my mother. I remember my mother dropping me off at his office to spend the day with him, after the divorce. And during that visit, I remember watching him flirt with a colleague while I sat nearby, too young to understand what was happening. This, like the breaking of the arm, would resurface much later.

He and I had our first beer together (just us men, he said) when I was nine years old. I wasn’t too young to understand that it was wrong, but the acceptance into his world was more important for me than anything else at that point.

Just like my stepfather’s approval was paramount for me for the first decade or so that I lived with him. He did what he called liaisoning and brokering work, which meant he earned whatever came in easily and not much else. My mother, after a 20-year career that ended with voluntary retirement, stepped out to find a job again and joined a BPO at forty. She worked there for over five years, shattering every age-related myth, and became a top performer. And my step father fought with her about the night shifts, about her “going out at night” and what people had to say about it

We moved out of his house fifteen years after she married him.

I am forty now. My office is full of people in their twenties, and a lot of the younger men talk to me the way my colleague did in Hyderabad. They open up. They tell me things. And every time one of them talks about his father, about some advice he received, about a man he idolises, about wanting to make his father proud, I feel that same thing I felt at the airport.

But here is what I also think about, on days like today.

Had my parents never divorced, had I grown up in that house, watching my father be who he was every day, would I still have become who I am? Would I be a raging alcoholic, wife beater and adulterer?

Had we never left my stepfather’s house, would I be a self-important misogynist who spent all day out of the house doing God knows what, and then came home to tell his wife, who had just come home from work, to serve him dinner?

Had these things never happened, would I be one of the men I sometimes encounter now, the ones who think it is funny to joke about slapping their wives for talking too much?

I do not know the answer. I am not sure anyone can know the answer to that kind of question about themselves. What I know is that everything I watched my father and my stepfather do helped me understand, with a clarity I did not ask for, the kind of man I never wanted to be. That is the standard I still hold myself to. It was built from negative space, from watching what damage looks like up close and deciding it would stop with me.

People say we must let go of the past. It is well-meaning advice, also and mostly useless, because the past does not ask permission before it shows up.

The ghosts are everywhere. Sometimes they are in the men around me, the gaslighters, the ones who let the women in their lives carry everything while they carry nothing, the ones who call it providing when what they mean is controlling.

And sometimes the ghosts show up at an airport in Hyderabad, in the voice of a young man talking about a father who taught him the value of money and the meaning of gratitude, while I sit next to him, wondering how I can miss something I never had.

One of the strangest questions that I was ever asked during my crime reporting days was whether crime reporting is “easy”. I found it strange because something like that is not supposed to be easy.

A journalist who steps into a beat like crime must step into the lowest, dirtiest muck of human nature. They must look at the worst of deeds that a human being is capable of, and then probe further into them. And I don’t mean ‘probe’ in the investigative sense, where, as popular culture will have you believe, a journalist is a far better investigator than the best of cops. They’re not. But getting the entire story requires probing of a different kind, where you ask questions, visit locations and assimilate enough information to be able to accurately present a picture of how ugly a human mind has the capacity to be. By definition, this is supposed to be among the hardest jobs ever. It would actually be quite weird if it was easy.

Raakh looks at the brutal murders of the Chopra siblings (Geeta, 16, and Sanjay, 14) in the same manner. Everything that happens in the story is portrayed exactly it is. The horrific nature of their abuse and killing isn’t diluted. The unadulterated grief of the children’s parents isn’t altered for ‘aesthetics’ (Sonali Bendre and Aamir Bashir, take a bow). And the sheer hatefulness of the villains Rajjo and Babu isn’t whitewashed.

I think that last part is the true strength of Raakh. For years, we’ve been fed role models dressed up as villains. They are cool, smooth, suave, rich, attractive, stylish and pretty much everything that a common person would want to be. They overshadow the hero, who is always poor, struggling, down on his luck and depressed. The beating they get in the last ten minutes of the story pales in comparison to how much of life they enjoy in the rest of it.

In Raakh, you start disliking Babu and Rajjo the moment you lay your eyes on them, and this, I suspect, is fully on purpose. They are robbers, abusers and murderers, and that is exactly how Raakh portrays them. Even when the story takes us into their histories, we don’t feel a tinge of sympathy for them. This is a masterful achievement on part of creators and writers Sandeep Saket and Anusha Nandkumar; that we, as the viewers, are able to differentiate quite clearly between circumstances and conscious choices on part of the two villains.

Sandeep and Anusha are good friends of mine. No, this isn’t a paid review. If it were, you’d know just by reading it. The point is that I’ve had the pleasure of tracing their journey, from Indian Police Force to Singham Again to Raakh, as well as read their book, The War That Made Raw (Westland, 2021). As is abundantly clear, they’re enamoured by crime and policing, with a side of espionage thrown in. But the fact that they can successfully pull off so many different approaches to the same subject is the biggest testament to their skills.

Moving on, what’s true for how much you’d hate Babu and Rajjo is also true for how much your heart will break for each of their victims. Suman and Sahil are just entry points into the feral nature of the two men we follow through the story. The demonic duo leave a string of victims in their wake and each of them is, as so many people are saying, difficult to watch. Again, this is commendable because it is so, so easy to veer over to the dark side, and make such scenes titillating “for commercial reasons.” Raakh refuses to do that, steadfastly.

The same stands true for the investigation part. Ali Fazal as the young and idealistic sub inspector takes us through the rabbithole of the case using a variety of lenses. The forensics part works best, because a skeptical policeman reluctantly turning to a just-established Forensic department adds a wonderful layer to the story. A small aside on the execution here; when Fazal enters the building, a worker is painting the fourth letter of the name of the building. It’s a wonderful way of setting up just how nascent Forensics is in the universe that the story is set in. At the same time, the fact that it is 1978 isn’t the central theme of the story. The case happened in that year. The story unfolds in that year. After the first couple of episodes, you just get used to the cops not having mobile phones to coordinate with each other. It is this easy, smooth storytelling that is one of the strengths of Raakh.

The other thing I noticed about Raakh is that it comes with many, many small messages wrapped inside the larger package. It touches upon child abuse, law enforcement, office politics, journalism, mental health, domestic violence, same-sex romance and the difficult dynamics of a father-son relationship. Raakh does not dwell longer than necessary on any of these. Neither does it dismiss any of them either. It acknowledges their existence and gives each one the space it deserves. Nowhere will you find any of these aspects struggling or scuffling for more screen-space out of natural order.

I loved Raakh primarily because it takes a stark look at a crime as heinous as the abuse and murder of children, and what it does to the entire ecosystem around it. And it does so without screaming from the rooftops. Because certain stories do not need to be told loudly. In fact, loudness can be a disservice to them, while restraint becomes a form of respect. And that is exactly what Raakh achieves.

Rachna Gurjar did not know she was being studied.

The content creator from Shivpuri district in Madhya Pradesh had built a following the way most rural lifestyle creators do: posting videos of her home, her gold jewellery, her daily life, the kind of content that gets shares in family WhatsApp groups and quiet envy in comment sections. A few days before the robbery, she had posted a video featuring her jewellery collection. The thieves came two nights later.

They came prepared. They brought a ladder. They cut the wire fencing around the property. They climbed in, located the bedroom where Rachna and her husband were sleeping, and locked it from outside. They used a stick to tilt the CCTV cameras upward before they started breaking open cupboards. By the time Rachna woke up at four in the morning and found herself locked in her own room, they were long gone, along with cash and jewellery worth somewhere between eight and ten lakh rupees.

Police are investigating whether the social media videos were used to plan the operation. The answer feels fairly obvious from the outside. The thieves knew the layout. They knew where the cameras were. They knew the family slept on the upper floor. They walked in knowing exactly what they were looking for and exactly how to avoid being identified while they took it.

Most of us are making a quieter version of the same mistake, every single day, and we will never know it until the moment we do.

Here is what you have probably posted in the last year alone.

A birthday post, which tells anyone paying attention your exact date of birth, and therefore a likely component of several of your passwords, your banking security questions, and your government ID verification answers. A “joined a new company” update on LinkedIn, which tells anyone reading it your employer, your designation, your reporting structure if you tagged your manager, your industry vertical, and a reasonable inference about what kind of data you handle at work. A photograph from your home with enough background detail to identify your neighbourhood, your building, the layout of your living space, the brands you own, the security measures you have or have not installed. A voice note or a talking video, which is a voice sample. A photograph of your face from multiple angles across multiple years, which is a facial recognition dataset.

None of this feels dangerous when you post it. Each piece feels harmless in isolation. A birthday post is a birthday post. A work update is a work update. A house photograph is just a nice memory.

The criminal reading it is not looking at any single piece. He is assembling a file.

What he builds from that file is a spear phishing attack, and it is worth understanding what separates it from the spam you already know how to ignore.

The email asking you to click a link to claim your Amazon prize is a net. It goes out to a million people. It works on the ones who do not notice that the sender address is slightly wrong, that the grammar is a little off, that no one actually wins prizes this way. You have probably learned to ignore it. Most people have.

Spear phishing is something else. It is a fishing rod, not a net, and it has your name on the hook.

The email arrives, and it uses your name. It mentions your company. It references a project or a vendor or a colleague that you actually work with, because that information was on your LinkedIn last month. It comes from an address that looks, at a glance, like it belongs to your IT department or your HR team or your CEO. It asks you to verify your credentials, or open an attachment, or approve a payment. It is written in the language of your workplace, about the things your workplace actually does, because the person who wrote it spent three hours reading everything you and your colleagues have posted publicly before sitting down to write it.

And this is not theoretical. Spear phishing now accounts for the overwhelming majority of successful corporate data breaches globally. The attack does not begin with a hacker. It begins with a researcher. And the research happens on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and your company’s own website, all of it public, all of it freely available, most of it put there by the targets themselves.

You post a photograph from your office and someone now knows your building, your floor, the badge reader visible in the background, and the name of the colleague who wandered into the frame. You post about a frustrating day at work and you have just told anyone reading that you are stressed, distracted, and possibly more likely than usual to click something without looking closely. You post about a flight and you have just told a burglar that your home will be empty for the next four days, and a social engineer that you are in a different city and therefore reachable at unusual hours.

Rachna Gurjar’s thieves needed a house layout and a CCTV map. They got it from her videos. A corporate attacker needs an org chart, a list of active projects, a sense of internal culture and language, and an email address. He gets it from your LinkedIn activity, your colleagues’ posts, your company’s press releases, and the conference panel you spoke on last quarter where you mentioned you were rolling out a new payments platform.

The criminals targeting Rachna knew where the cameras were before they arrived. The criminal targeting you knows what your boss’s email address looks like, what your company’s current priorities are, and which vendor you are in the middle of negotiating a contract with. He has been following you for longer than you realise, and you have been updating him regularly.

The uncomfortable truth at the centre of all of this is that the digital footprint most people leave is deliberate, curated and updated. We post to be seen, to be known, to build a presence, to stay connected, to celebrate, to vent, to exist publicly in the way that social media has made the default. None of that is wrong. But it produces, as a side effect, a document that describes us with a level of detail that would have been impossible to compile a generation ago.

A private investigator hired to build a profile on you in 1995 would have needed weeks and significant resources. Today, twenty minutes on LinkedIn and Instagram gets you most of the way there.

The difference between Rachna Gurjar’s situation and yours is not the nature of the threat. It is the visibility of the consequence. Her loss was immediate and physical. Yours, if it comes, will arrive as an email that looks legitimate, a phone call from someone who knows too much, a transaction that gets approved because the approval request looked exactly like all the other approval requests. By the time the damage is clear, the trail back to your own posts will be invisible to you, because no one will send you a note explaining which update of yours they found most useful.

The solution is not to stop posting. The solution is to post the way someone who understands the audience would. Or be aware of the risks of posting what you’re posting.

Your actual audience is not just your followers. It is anyone who can see what your followers can see. And somewhere in that larger, invisible audience, on some percentage of what you post, someone is taking notes.

What you choose to show them is up to you. But please stop assuming that they are not paying attention.

In early 2024, I was invited to speak at a State-level conference on domestic violence in Maharashtra. Stakeholders from across the state were attending, and I uploaded the event poster to my social media about a week before. The very first comment, on LinkedIn of all places, was from a man urging me to “talk about fake cases.”

I am the son of a domestic abuse survivor. My earliest memory of my father is of him breaking my mother’s forearm. It never healed properly because he could not be bothered to take her to a doctor. It still hurts when the weather gets cold. I write about this occasionally, and every time I do, there is a horde of men in the replies asking: but what about men’s abuse? There are also those who call me a liar, those who call my mother a liar, those who say she deserved it. All of them are men.

I mention this not to reiterate my own history, but because the LinkedIn comment and the Twitter replies fall in the same category as the Sejal Pawar clip.

The footage of the young doctor at Pranit More’s show talking about how she and her colleagues would compare the sizes of male cadavers’ genitals during anatomy sessions was from the same show as the Rs 370 biryani interaction involving Himanshu Jangra. Which is significant, because the clip was not new. But it only became viral when the country was fuming over Himanshu Jangra.

I think that is the most revealing thing about the entire episode. More revealing, in fact, than what Pawar said, than the debate about medical ethics that followed, and even her eventual apology. The clip did not go viral on its own timeline. It went viral when it was most useful.

This, in a nutshell, is how redirect looks like. Also known as whataboutery.

The mechanics of whataboutery are quite straightforward. You wait until someone points out a problem, and then you point to a different problem, preferably one that involves the other side. The objective is to hijack the narrative and get everyone talking about the opposite party, and hope that it creates enough smoke to hide the original issue.

After the Jangra clip, the Pawar clip served this purpose quite effectively. The conversation about male entitlement, about the room that laughed and about what boys are taught from a young age about what a woman’s consent costs were all buried under a fresh argument about double standards and selective outrage. Posters of Jangra and Pawar side by side sprang up overnight. The conversation shifted from violation of consent to how “women get away with worse.”

Pawar’s remark’s, by anybody’s standards, were insensitive. Joking about a dead person’s body, in a public space, is not okay, and for multiple reasons. The criticism was legitimate, and the conversation about medical ethics and professional conduct that followed had real value.

But none of that is what drove the clip’s virality. What drove it was the usefulness of a woman doing something wrong at precisely the moment everyone was angry about a man doing something wrong. The two events were collapsed into a single argument. “See? Women do it too”, by the logic of the redirect, was used to say, “What Jangra did was either not so bad or at least not worth singling out.”

This is the signature move of Men’s Rights Activism in the social media age: a counter-narrative that lands close enough to the original conversation to seem like a response to it, while actually shutting the conversation down. Where a direct defence would be immediately called out, a lateral one works wonders.

I was born in 1986. My generation encountered social media in our mid-to-late twenties, when our identities were already formed, when we had enough years behind us to at least question what we were absorbing. The children growing up today have no such luck.

A fourteen-year-old with a phone in his hand is encountering all of this in real time, and there is an entire buffet out there. There are podcasts with two men sitting across from each other but looking sideways at the camera while talking to each other. The same two men, mind, episode after episode. In any other universe, this would be dismissed as boring. But when the conversation is about feminazis and false cases and how Indian men are the most oppressed people on the planet, the fifteen-year-old who has just been spurned by his crush listens.

And what does that boy learn from the Pawar-Jangra news cycle? He learns that for every story about male entitlement, there is a corresponding story about female misconduct waiting to be deployed. He learns that one cancels out the other. He learns that the correct response to being told that something is wrong is to find the equivalent thing on the other side and wave it around like a flag. And as a direct consequence, he learns that accountability is a game that he needs to win with the right moves.

This is how you raise a generation of men who genuinely believe that the real problem is the bias against them. Because every time the evidence was presented, someone changed the channel.

Because, consider what does not trend.

On June 1 of this year, about ten days before the Jangra clip completed its journey through every group chat in the country, a 32-year-old man in the Satara area of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar was arrested for repeatedly sexually assaulting his own five-year-old son. The case was registered. The arrest was made. A POCSO case was filed. And then the news cycle moved on, within a day, maybe less, to something else entirely.

No outrage economy assembled around it. No one’s employer got tagged. No Twitter thread turned it into a pattern. The crowds that laughed at Jangra did not go quiet for it. Nobody demanded justice. No social media posts asked for the strictest punishment for the abuser. It did not help that the abuser was a man himself. That kind of thing would genuinely have the MRAs confused. Completely out of syllabus, what can one do.

And no, this is not a one-off example. This silence extends to every issue that actually affects boys and men negatively. When the British-era Indian Penal Code was replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the old Section 377 disappeared.

For all its history of being weaponised against gay men, the section at least criminalised forcible anal intercourse. The BNS has no such provision. In other words, there is currently no section in Indian law under which a man can be prosecuted specifically for sexually abusing another man. There are no signature campaigns about this. No trending hashtags. No urgent threads from the accounts that spend their days cataloguing the injustices visited upon Indian men. The Men’s Rights Activists, who are otherwise so meticulous about the ways the system fails men, have had nothing to say about the specific moment the system removed a protection that existed for men. They are, as ever, too busy redirecting.

And then there is alimony.

India has one of the lowest divorce rates in the world, roughly one per cent of marriages. Anyone who has covered crime in this country, anyone who has sat in a family court, anyone who has reported on domestic violence statistics, knows what the number actually reflects: the stigma attached to leaving, the financial dependency that makes leaving impossible for many women, the family pressure that keeps people in arrangements they did not choose and cannot escape. The number is low because leaving is hard and expensive and shameful and sometimes dangerous, and everyone who has spent any time near a family court knows this.

Despite all of this, in certain sections of Indian social media, a tireless argument about alimony rages. The content is the same. How the system is rigged against men, how women weaponise the courts, how the laws need reform in favour of husbands.

When Atul Subhash died by suicide in December last year, leaving behind a video and a 24-page note describing his ordeal at the hands of a wife he said had weaponised the courts against him, the grief was real and the questions his case raised were legitimate. His suffering deserved to be taken seriously. Within hours, however, the redirect was running at full speed. Women who raised concerns about domestic violence were feminazis. Men who supported female victims were simps. The machinery did not pause to grieve Atul Subhash. It used him.

If you pay careful attention, you’ll notice that the alimony argument spikes conveniently in the wake of dowry deaths. Every time.

In a way, the Sejal Pawar controversy was actually proof that the Jangra conversation was a much required one. The redirect only deploys when the argument against men is strong, and needs a distraction.

The test is simple. Check whether the people most loudly citing the Pawar clip were otherwise engaged with questions of dignity, consent, or accountability before that. More plainly, ask yourself what they would have done with the Pawar clip if the Jangra clip had never existed.

The answer tells you everything about what the redirect is actually for.

It was two in the morning when my phone rang. A male journalist, a colleague of sorts, was on the line. I had sent a young female intern on a field assignment earlier that day. She was sharp, reliable, and I had no reason to second-guess the call. He wanted to know her name.

There was nothing uncertain in his voice. No awkwardness, no half-formed reason offered up to fill the silence. He did not say he had a story tip for her, or that he had crossed paths with her on the field, or that he was calling for any professional reason at all. He simply wanted to know her name, at two in the morning, and the ease with which he asked suggested that this was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. The entitlement was so complete, so matter-of-fact, that he did not even register that the call might require some accounting for.

He was simply doing what felt natural to him.

I gave him nothing and ended the call. He called again, twice, before he either got the message or gave up.

I lay awake for a while after that, turning the call over in my mind. What troubled me was not the man. Men like him exist in every newsroom, every office, every profession. What troubled me was the certainty in his voice. He had not called me with any awareness that he was doing something that needed to be concealed or softened. There was no performance of innocence, no casual framing designed to make the question seem incidental. He just asked, directly, because it had not occurred to him that he shouldn’t.

That is the thing about entitlement at a certain depth. It does not announce itself. It simply assumes.

I thought about that phone call again recently, watching the clip of Himanshu Jangra at Pranit More’s crowdwork show make its way across every platform and into every group chat. You have almost certainly seen it by now. Jangra, 22, from Gurugram, tells More about a date. They went to a local market, had chicken biryani, the bill came to around Rs 370. The woman asked to be dropped home afterward. “Maine kaha 370 rupaye lage hai,” Jangra now famously said, “wasool toh karunga.” I spent Rs 370, so I’m going to get my money’s worth.

More laughed. He called it a “Peak Gurgaon moment.” The audience erupted.

The outrage that followed was swift and, in many ways, just. Jangra has since been fired from his job at a Gurugram design firm. More issued a public apology, acknowledging that he should have challenged the remark rather than laughing and moving on. The internet moved on to its next verdict.

But I want to stay with that laugh a little longer, because I think it is the most revealing thing in the clip, more revealing, even, than what Jangra said.

More’s laugh was not calculated. He was not making a considered decision to endorse Jangra’s worldview. He was doing what men in rooms full of other men have been doing for as long as such rooms have existed: taking the path of least resistance. A man in the crowd said something that the other men found funny. The comedian laughed. The room laughed. The moment passed, or was supposed to.

What nobody in that room stopped to ask was why it was funny in the first place, and what exactly they were all agreeing to when they laughed.

This is where the conversation usually gets stuck. People want to talk about Jangra, about the specific rottenness of a man who believes Rs 370 buys him something beyond a plate of biryani. And yes, that belief deserves every bit of the scrutiny it has received. But Jangra is, in a sense, the easy part. He said the quiet part loud, which is why he became the story.

The harder conversation is about the room. About every man who laughed without thinking. About the social architecture that made the laughter feel natural, feel automatic, feel like the only reasonable response to a relatable guy telling a relatable story.

Because truth that most men will not say out loud, though most men know it, is an unspoken curriculum that runs parallel to everything else boys are taught. It begins early, in playgrounds and classrooms and the backseat of cars, and it teaches them which jokes earn approval and which silences earn suspicion. It teaches them that a certain kind of talk about women is not merely tolerated but expected, that it is, in fact, a demonstration of belonging. To participate is to pass. To hesitate is to invite the question that every man instinctively fears: what kind of man are you, exactly?

By the time a boy becomes a man, this curriculum is so thoroughly internalised that it no longer feels like a choice. The laugh arrives before the thought does. The punchline lands before the conscience has a chance to weigh in. And the man who laughed moves on with his day, having done nothing more than exist comfortably inside a system that was built for exactly that kind of comfort.

Pranit More did not necessarily fail that night because he is a bad person. He failed because the system worked exactly as designed.

A few years after that midnight phone call, I was at a press club dinner. A group of journalists, unwinding after a long day, the kind of gathering where the conversation loosens and the guards come down and men say things they would not say with a recorder running. One of them made a remark. The kind that gets labelled “locker room talk” in the same breath as it gets excused and forgotten. I would have let it go too, except there was a woman and a child at the next table.

I objected. I kept my voice level. I was deliberate about being polite, because I understood the room and I understood what objecting in that room meant. I did not moralize or lecture. I simply said that the remark was not appropriate given who was within earshot.

The journalist’s reaction was immediate and it was absolute. He told me to keep my views to myself. Then, reaching for what he clearly believed was the most devastating thing he could say, he added: “Yeh tera Twitter nahi hai.” This is not your Twitter.

I have thought about that line many times since. It was not just an insult. It was a statement of principle. It was the articulation of a worldview in which the world is divided into two spaces: the public performance space, where you watch your words and manage your image, and the real world, where men speak freely among themselves, where the rules are older and more honest and belong only to the people in the room. His argument was that I had confused the two. That by objecting, I had brought the performance into a space where it did not belong, and in doing so, I had violated something.

What I had actually violated, of course, was the consensus. The agreement, never written down and never spoken aloud, that men in rooms like that one do not hold each other accountable. That the price of belonging is a certain practiced deafness to things that should not go unremarked.

Taking a stand is a choice. It always is. And it always carries a cost.

The man who stays silent at that table, though, is not protecting anything noble. He is making a transaction. He is buying his comfort and his belonging by passing the cost on to someone who was never invited into the negotiation, and who will bear the consequences of the silence long after the dinner is over and the men have gone home.

This is what connects the 2 am phone call and the press club remark and the Rs 370 biryani in one unbroken line. None of the men involved thought of themselves as doing something wrong. The journalist who called me at midnight was not a predator who had paused to consider and then proceeded anyway. He was a man operating entirely within a system that had never once told him to pause. Jangra was not a villain consciously performing villainy for an audience. He was a guy telling a story he expected other guys to find funny, and he was right. More was not endorsing the commodification of women. He was laughing at a crowd-work bit the way comedians laugh at crowd-work bits, because the room was warm and the moment was easy and nothing in his years of experience had trained him to feel the cold underneath it.

That is the unbearable weight of it. The system does not require malice. It runs perfectly well on thoughtlessness. It has been running on thoughtlessness for a very long time.

I am not writing this to defend or justify either Pranit More or Himanshu Jangra. What I am more interested in is the question that neither the apology nor the firing fully answers: what would it have taken for someone in that room to say something in the moment? What would it have taken to turn to Jangra and say that what he described was not a funny story about a cheap date but a statement about a woman’s body and who gets to decide what happens to it. To absorb the awkward silence that would follow. To be okay with the shift in the room’s temperature and not immediately scramble to restore the warmth.

That is the thing that is genuinely difficult. Not knowing that the joke is wrong. Most men, if pressed, know that the joke is wrong. The difficulty is in the doing, in the specific, costly, socially exposed act of saying so out loud, in real time, in front of men whose approval you have been taught since boyhood to need.

Manhood was never the problem. But the weight we have built around it is a weight we constructed ourselves, one unexamined laugh at a time. Which means it is a weight we can choose to put down.

It only means something when it costs something.

I always wanted to be a writer. More specifically, in hindsight, I think I wanted to be a storyteller. When I was in school, languages were my favourite subjects because the textbooks had so many stories in them. More than the technical aspects of language , like spelling, grammar, and syntax, I was fascinated by the stories and read them over and over again till the pages started coming apart.

I hated language exams because everything was set and pre-decided. “Recite a story of your choice” didn’t really give us a choice. We were given three stories to learn by heart and had to regurgitate one. I missed that instruction and recited Alice In Wonderland, which I had recently finished reading. And failed the exam.

Client Zero And The First Break

Cut to 2010, when I was two years into my job as a journalist at The Asian Age in Mumbai, and had recently come into contact with a well-known author. The man, who we shall call Client Zero to protect confidentiality (and add mystery ), was quite a name in non-fiction writing and was working on his next book.

He was around 90 per cent done when he called me in a panic; one of the subjects he had just interviewed had helped him identify a crucial element missing in his book, and he needed someone to research, collate and send it to him at short notice.

It is only today that I realise he chose me not because of my skills but because I was an easy hire. I was a fresher, in awe of him, and eager to please. But most big breaks come this way, so no regrets.

The subject of Client Zero’s book was aligned with what I was doing at the time ; crime reporting. I started calling up all the cops I had some equation with, and by the end of the day, had zeroed in on three officers who had the most knowledge about the chapter Client Zero wanted.

Over the next two days, I met all of them, and it was only while talking to them that I found out two were due to retire the next week! I squeezed them for every bit of information they had and only then turned to the internet for additional tidbits.

The World Wide Web as a tool of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) wasn’t as strong at the time as it is today, but I was still able to track down some news articles. I made careful notes from these and tracked down the journalists who wrote them for more.

The Chapter That Changed Everything

By the end of the week, I thought I had enough for a detailed chapter. It was at that point I realised this was more than just a research opportunity. I had always loved to write, and this was my one shot at impressing Client Zero.

The first challenge was the beginning. It works the same way in literature as it does in journalism; your first few paragraphs help the reader decide if they want to read further. I toyed with five or six possible beginnings before I selected the strongest part of the story, which was the end.

Starting at the end is always risky, as I realised much later in my writing journey. Not everyone can pull off a good narrative that begins near the end, goes back to the beginning, and then makes its way back to the end in a logical, coherent way. If your first paragraph is the end of the story, your next two paragraphs are crucial.

I remember I spent some three hours just perfecting those first three paragraphs before I was satisfied with them.

To my delight, once I had done this, the rest of it flowed perfectly. I finished the chapter within an hour. I spent another hour proofreading it carefully before sending it to Client Zero. Then, I told myself that I had done everything I possibly could and got back to work.

Or tried to. But every ten minutes, I would check my phone and my email. I knew Client Zero was a busy man, and I knew nobody was duty-bound to read my writing as soon as I sent it to them. The latter has never happened, not even when I have sent heartfelt emails declaring undying love to my exes (one reason why they are exes).

It took two whole days, but Client Zero got back to me saying he loved it and was very impressed with the depth of my research.

“Just one thing,” he said. “The beginning is always in the middle. I don’t like starting a chapter at the end. We’ll have to change the beginning to another scene.”

He went on to give me a few options and added, “Since you write so well, you can rewrite the chapter with the new beginning and send it to me by the end of the week.”

As I went home that night, I realised that more than being happy with his feedback and the opportunity to rewrite the chapter, I was sad about the beginning being changed. The feeling intensified when I started rewriting it. It felt like I was being unfaithful to something I had created.

And that was the moment I knew I would be a writer someday. I loved the craft too much to not become one.

Anyway, with a heavy heart, I rewrote the chapter and sent it to Client Zero. He thanked me and sent it to his editor. And I started looking forward to seeing my name in the acknowledgments for “research and support.”

Then, a month later, Client Zero emailed me the final chapter to check before the book went to print. I opened the email and saw that the beginning was the same as before ; the one I had written originally.

My hands trembled a little, but I realised I was smiling from ear to ear. I went through the chapter carefully to ensure there were no errors, flagged a few stray typos, and wrote back an extremely carefully worded email saying, “I see that the chapter begins the way I had written it. I hope it is not a mistake on the editor’s part? Have they taken the right version?”

Client Zero wrote back saying that he had a “discussion” with his editor and it was “decided after some debate” that the original worked better.

I knew who the editor was and sought him out.

“We had a little fight,” the editor laughed. “He kept insisting that the beginning is in the middle and I kept saying that a mantra by his mentor doesn’t automatically invalidate all good beginnings that don’t follow it. Ultimately, he gave in.”

I realised I was smiling from ear to ear again.

Around three months later, Client Zero sent me the link to a news article. A filmmaker had signed a deal with him to adapt this very chapter for a film. Not because of the way the chapter began, of course, but because this was a significant development in the world that Client Zero was exploring — and the filmmaker wanted to explore it even further.

Weeks turned into months, and the film was released around a year after the book. And the opening scene was exactly how I had written the chapter — beginning at the end and going into flashback to tell the story.

The Lessons

The experience taught me two things.

The first was to spot an opportunity and take it. I saw a great opportunity to showcase my writing skills when the brief was limited to research — and I decided to just give it a shot.

There are, of course, clients who have reacted adversely. Not everyone appreciates talent when it is not theirs. Some have very sweetly let me know that I was expected to stay in my lane, and some have completely ignored my suggestions. But all it takes is one chance.

That one opportunity I seized set me on the path to becoming a writer, published author, researcher, and manuscript editor.

The second and bigger lesson was the importance of audacity. You need a lot of audacity to seize opportunities that appear out of reach.

I pulled the same stunt three years later, after I’d switched to The Indian Express. In my very first month, a major celebrity was acquitted of some very serious charges, while only some smaller ones were retained. The celeb’s fan brigade erupted in celebration and that evening, an email came from our head office in Delhi.

They wanted someone to talk to the cops who investigated that case and get inside dope on exactly what evidence had been gathered and compiled against the celeb. The idea was to find out whether the cops had just tried to hang the noose around a public figure’s head, or if this really was a case of reasonable doubt. The brief was to send “a couple of paragraphs to be included in the Editorial for the next day’s edition.”

I spoke to several officers who were part of the core investigating team, and at the end of one hour, I was faced with the same dilemma. The information I had gathered was worth far more than a couple of paragraphs in an Editorial.

At the same time, it was a new job, and I wasn’t exactly going to walk into the Editor’s office saying, Hey, I need a bigger slot because I have a full-fledged story, not an input.

I summoned all the audacity I had and started writing, beginning my “input” with the strongest bit from the interviews I had taken. I built a picture of the entire investigation, with quotes wherever applicable, and tied it off rather neatly, even if I may say so myself.

I emailed it to my Editor here in Mumbai, with the subject line saying “Input For Editorial.”

Half an hour later, my Editor called me inside and asked me a couple of questions. Then he said, “This bloody thing is a story by itself.” I saw that he was editing it himself. I just smiled politely and said, “Thank you, sir.”

The next morning, it was the front-page lead. It was also picked up by the international news media and cited in other, larger articles by veteran columnists.

Audacity isn’t arrogance. It stems more from belief in self and nothing can replace it.

Finally, a lot of people ask me if I felt shortchanged by Client Zero because I only had a credit at the end of the book. The answer is no.

I got far more than my name on the cover. In fact, as a rookie journalist, my name on the cover would have looked like a favour granted by a magnanimous author to a needy youngster.

What I got instead was trust, and in ghostwriting, trust is currency.

I’ve ghostwritten and edited over a dozen manuscripts since then, and am still doing more. All of them have come to me only through the trust, goodwill, and word-of-mouth publicity that I have garnered over the years.

So take heart, fellow writers. Things have a way of working out rather beautifully if you can just seize opportunities when you see them — with no small amount of audacity.

YEAR ONE

He was scared. Of course, he was scared.

As he stood a short distance away from the gate and saw it clang shut with a finality that sounded like doom, he could feel the rising sense of dread inside. But in hindsight, he would think years later, the first few weeks were better. Because he was unaware of many things that went on behind those bars, and sometimes, ignorance is truly bliss.

There were rules. A lot of rules.

Rules for waking up, exercise in the morning, keeping busy through the day, meals, free time, reading books, sleeping… everything had rules. Very little was voluntary. It was supposed to instil a sense of discipline. Sundays were for washing and cleaning. There were surprise inspections and checks. Contraband was confiscated and often destroyed.

Punishments ranged from being made to stand out in the compound for long hours to physical beatings.

There was a hierarchy, of course. The older ones lorded over the younger ones. The word ‘seniors’ was uttered with reverence and fear. There were guards for each section, and often these were the worst of all, revelling in the power that came after having come up through the ranks.

And of course, there were the predators. At first, he thought they were just bullies. ‘Seniors’ who liked pushing the juniors around and getting them to do their washing and cleaning.

And then, the one in charge of the section winked at him. He thought it was a gesture of friendship, so he winked back. Soon, they started hanging out together. He loved the attention and benevolence. It made him feel important. His chest puffed up a little as he walked alongside the top dog. He felt safe in a sea of strangers, mostly hostile ones.

And then, one night, the top dog came to his bed, woke him up quietly, and took him to a corner room.

The next morning, the top dog looked right through him, like he didn’t exist.

YEAR TWO

He watched from afar as a group of newbies entered. Lost, scared, unaware. He wanted to shout at the top of his lungs, tell them to run away while they still could. But he stayed silent and watched as the gate clanged shut behind them.

The previous year, he had made the mistake of confiding in ‘friends’. Within a day, they were blackmailing him. By the end of the year, he was completely under their control. On the last day of the year, he watched in helpless fury as the one responsible for his plight finished his sentence and walked out of the gate, dressed in new clothes, surrounded by his loved ones.

Year Two was a repeat of the same nightmare. There were other ‘seniors’ waiting for a chance to get their pound of flesh. The ‘secret’ he had confided in his ‘friends’ was freely passed around. He felt afraid to sleep at night, not knowing who would come to his bed this time.

In the middle of the year, he wrote to his family about what had happened. Their first reaction was to berate him for not speaking out further. Once they had had their fill of establishing themselves as victims, they involved the authorities. Token words were thrown around, and reassurances were given. His family members went back home.

And he became a pariah. A narc. A snitch.

YEAR THREE

Year three was a daze. He just existed. He went through the motions. He toyed with ideas of self-harm and also of breaking out and running away.

He failed to muster the courage for either.

There were more predators. Some wanted to enslave him for one reason, the others for another.

It was also the year he realized that a lot of those who had entered along with him were becoming ‘seniors’. They were lording over the other juniors. They had people doing their washing and cleaning. They were part of gangs and looked out for each other. Some of them worked out regularly. Others smuggled money and goodies from home and used them to increase their status.

He was the only one still a ‘junior’ in his third year. He watched. He learned.

YEAR FOUR

He earned his first punishment from the authorities in the middle of Year Four. He had assaulted a particularly irritating junior who loved talking about his wealth and went around assuming everybody wanted to be his best friend.

The confidence that it gave him led him to bully others in the same category. A couple of small gangs took notice of him. A particularly nasty senior started becoming his friend.

Till the juniors complained against him, and he was punished. He took the punishment, let the shame wash over him, and went back to his section. An inmate one year his senior delivered a fist-bump on his shoulder as he passed by.

“What’s up, Don?” the senior murmured. He was a Don, now.

YEAR FIVE

“Just one more year,” his parents told him at the beginning of the fifth year. He nodded. He had long since given up trying to make them understand just what it was like on the inside.

He went through the motions, fighting back when he could, submitting when he couldn’t. He had become a survivor. He had learned the rules. Keep your head down. Don’t start a fight, but don’t walk away from one. Don’t go to the authorities. Don’t assume someone is your friend. Never confide in anyone.

He survived.

On his last day, he packed his belongings and carried them downstairs, where his parents were waiting. “We’re proud of you,” they told him.

He chuckled.

At the gate, he looked back. He was nine years old when he entered the place. He was 13 now, a completely different person.

He chuckled again as he read the writing over the gate.

‘All Boys Boarding School’

“Loan agent visit is due!”

For months, Sundar Dhaygude (name changed on request) began his day by reading this message on his phone.

Dhaygude had never imagined he would one day be living in constant panic. He was sailing through life on an even keel, despite occasional bouts of stress that came with ensuring he had enough in his account to pay his monthly EMI. He had taken a personal loan from his bank when his mother fell seriously ill. The loan was processed within minutes over a phone call, and every convenience was extended to him at the time. He was determined to not let a single EMI bounce so that his credit score would stay healthy and get free of the loan as soon as he could.

Six months down the line, even as his mother was recovering from a bypass surgery and other health complications, he found his expenses rising and paying the EMI every month became slightly challenging. And as if on cue, the notification popped up on his screen — his UPI service was also giving out loans through Non Banking Financial Corporations (NBFCs). It sounded too good to be true — paperless applications, no collateral, quick disbursal. As if in a dream, he filled out the form in the app itself and almost cried out loud as Rs three lakh arrived in his account within minutes.

He quickly set some money aside to be able to pay his bank’s EMIs for the next three months and used the rest to deal with his mother’s medical bills and other expenses.

Another three months passed happily before he missed the date of his first EMI from the NBFC. And then, hell broke loose.

“The lady who called started the conversation politely enough. I tried telling her that my mother was unwell again and I was in a bit of a spot. Her voice suddenly changed and she said, ‘What was that? Really? First you say you have monetary problems and now you claim something different?’ I was stunned. She was calling me a liar to my face. But she wasn’t done. Smoothly, she slipped in a veiled threat about a ‘field visit’ to my house soon and that’s when I got really scared,” Dhaygude says.

His story is similar to the one lived by thousands of Indians currently grappling with NBFC debt. The loans are given out without any hassles but it takes one missed EMI, or one day of delay, for the nightmare to begin. For a quintessential middle-class working man or woman, the biggest fear is recovery agents turning up at their door. Many of the borrowers take these loans without informing their families and the prospect of them finding out, as well as being harassed at the same time, is one that anybody would want to avoid.

“My mother was already unwell and I didn’t want her to know I’d borrowed money for her treatment. I had no idea what to do and in my desperation, I turned to other NBFCs. I borrowed from one to pay off the other and in a year, I owed upwards of Rs 8 lakh, collectively, from five different NBFCs. That meant five multiplied by God knows how many recovery agents on a monthly basis. ‘Home visit’ was the first threat they’d use,” Dhaygude says.

The methods are subtle. Of the screenshots shared with this writer by Dhaygude and six others, some were politely worded — “Kindly clear your EMI to avoid agent visit”. Others, not so much — “If you don’t pay right now we are coming to your home address and office address.” or “You failed to honour your agreement! Now, a visit will be made to your residence (full address) by our collection team!”. Yet others, somewhere in between — “Good morning. Mr Khatri and Mr Sheikh will be visiting your residence at 3 pm today. Kindly keep EMI in cash ready plus their conveyance charges.”

“After a point, the UPI app through which I took the first loan started sending me notifications twice a day saying, ‘Pay now to avoid agent visit, legal action and huge penalties.” It would be the first thing I’d see when I woke up and the last thing I’d see before I went to bed. I didn’t sleep properly for months,” Dhaygude says.

Amina Rehman (name changed on request) has a similar story to tell.

“I’m afraid to answer calls from unknown numbers. Installing TrueCaller helps identify the recovery agents but also adds to my stress subtly. Some numbers are saved as ‘Legal Team’, which scares me into thinking that I am going to be dragged into court. Messages come at any time of the day. I live in constant fear of them landing up at my doorstep when I’m at work. Most of my days are spent begging them not to come home because my father would kill me if he found out,” says the Kalyan resident who now owes around Rs 4.5 lakh to three NBFCs.

For Sankhayan Dutta, the nightmare actually came true. An NBFC sent an agent to his residence while he was out of station for a work assignment.

“The lady was polite and didn’t even enter the house. She just told my sister that I was behind on my EMIs and not responding to calls — which was a lie as I’d been sending text messages to every number I missed a call from. This woman called me after she visited my home, not before, and even replied to my text. We had an entire conversation on text but five minutes later, my sister called me in a panic. I had to come clean to her and begged her not to tell our father,” the Thane resident narrates.

The tactic, however, worked. Dutta got on his phone and borrowed from another NBFC in order to pay off the first one. Now, he’s deeper in debt and has no idea how he will pay it off.

This writer first started finding out more about the NBFC trap when a friend, Niranjan Mankame (name changed) sought advice over the harassment he was facing from two NBFCs.

“In one case, I took Rs 8,000 from this app that offered a simple yet effective service. I was allowed to ‘withdraw’ the amount approved for me every month, provided I pay it back on the 5th of the next month. Once I did that, I could borrow the same amount for a month immediately. This suited me as I was already paying a Rs 12,000 EMI to an NBFC and the extra eight grand every month helped,” Mankame says.

Things were going well till Mankame switched to a different bank and tried delinking the old account from the app in question, so that he could link a new one. When he couldn’t see the option in the app, he sent an email to their customer care email ID, but received no response. In the midst of all this, the repayment date passed. The next morning, he woke up to threats on the phone.

“I tried telling them that I needed to sort out the bank account issue first but they wouldn’t listen. I finally lost my temper at them and told them to do their worst. I really was not prepared for what their ‘worst’ would be,” says Mankame.

First, they sent a ‘legal notice’. It was so full of holes, especially for Mankame, who has some knowledge of the law due to the nature of his work. He wrote back to the ‘legal department’ of the NBFC highlighting the same. A week later, he received pictures of his building, taken from outside, in his WhatsApp inbox.

“It is chilling to see those pictures coming from an unknown number, while you’re miles away and not in a position to do anything. The pictures were followed by a message saying, ‘Team is standing outside your address’. Then, they started calling incessantly. I locked myself in the office loo and calmed myself down. My hands were trembling but I managed to type out a message saying if they didn’t leave immediately, I’d call the police control room. The threats persisted, and the sender kept repeating that I should clear my outstanding immediately. I called a lawyer friend of mine. He took the person’s number from him, called him and gave him a piece of his mind,” Mankame recalls.

At Mankame’s behest, this writer made some inquiries and found some interesting facts.

First of all, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has very clear guidelines in place for NBFCs and their recovery process. The most important one is: Recovery agents can not visit the residence or office a borrower directly. The borrower is to be called to a central recovery location and only if s/he fails to turn up twice can home or office visits be made.

The kicker is that these guidelines are available for anyone to see on the RBI’s website. And yet, there is next to no awareness on this. The NBFCs definitely don’t publicise this.

Mankame, Dutta, Rehman and Dhaygude were all astounded when this writer shared this finding with them.

“It is shocking to see how blatantly these rules are being violated. This effectively means that what happened with me was illegal,” says Dutta.

Mankame was furious. He registered an FIR with the police the same day and is also talking to a lawyer.

The other major finding was that borrowers have the option to complain against recovery methods. They need to first write an email to the Customer Care department. If the response is not satisfactory, they can write to the Grievance Redressal official. If that, too, does not address the issue, the borrower can raise a complaint on the RBI’s complaint portal as well.

Dhaygude and Rehman have elected to go this route. They’ve written detailed emails to the Customer Care department, with screenshots of the messages they’ve received.

This writer, however, found a fifth victim. Chandan Kalerkar (name changed) has tried to fight back against the harassment he faces from multiple NBFCs but to no avail.

“I sent emails to Customer Care and then Grievance Redressal departments but got the royal run-around. First, they asked me to ‘be patient’. Then, they said that they ‘hadn’t found any violations’. Next, they asked for evidence. Fortunately, I had preserved screenshots of all the messages I’d received. So I compiled them datewise and sent them. The next reply asked me to send ‘proper screenshots with dates clearly visible’. I pointed out to them that the dates were visible in all my screenshots. Ultimately, they wrote back saying that these ‘agents do not belong to us’. I had no idea how to react,” says Kalerkar.

He, however, refuses to back down.

“I have written back to them asking how, if these agents got my contact and loan details if they ‘don’t belong to them’ but haven’t received any response. However, I have fulfilled my responsibility of approaching the concerned officials from the NBFC, and am now empowered to approach the RBI through their online complaint portal. I have realised that preserving screenshots and PDFs of email exchanges is very important and I have done so from the start,” he adds.

As victims go through the ordeal of living in constant fear, predatory lending platforms continue to benefit from the lack of awareness and fear psychosis.

The RBI’s recent proposal, reportedly set to be effective from July 1, 2026, seeks to curb several of the practices mentioned above. What remains to be seen is whether these curbs will actually be enforced, or whether the profit driven loan shark industry will find new loopholes.

Our elderly are being hunted in ways that are both sophisticated and cruel. They are being told their bank accounts are frozen. They are being informed that their Aadhaar has been linked to money laundering. They are being placed under so-called “digital arrest.” They are being guided, step by step, to transfer life savings into “safe accounts.” They are being tricked by fake customer care numbers pulled off Google Maps. They are being frightened into sharing OTPs. And they are being kept on video calls for hours, isolated, confused and ashamed. These are not rare incidents. They are patterns.

We already know this. But what are the safeguards?

To understand the safeguards, we must first fully understand the problem. The problem is not that our parents and grandparents do not know how to use smartphones. They do. They Google “best remedies for daughter’s fast marriage.” They forward images claiming to show India during Diwali as seen from NASA satellites. They play music and make video calls. Clearly, the issue here is not digital illiteracy. The issue is digital direction.

The first requirement is a simple tweak when it comes to the direction. If an elderly person spends five minutes every day reading about cybercrime, watching a short awareness video or even scrolling through a credible police cyber cell page, something interesting happens. The algorithm begins to notice. Within a week, their phone will start recommending similar content. Awareness will stop being an occasional forwarded message and become part of their feed. The same system that today shows them miracle cures and conspiracy forwards can be trained to show them fraud alerts and safety tips. The internet adapts to behaviour. Small behavioural shifts create large informational shifts. That is the first safeguard.

The second is drilling certain truths so deeply that they become instinctive. Nobody can ever ask for their OTP. Not a bank manager. Not a courier company. Not a police officer. Google Maps contact numbers are not gospel; scammers replace legitimate numbers with their own and wait for desperate customers to call. And there is no such thing as a digital arrest. No police unit in this country can interrogate, detain or arrest anyone over a video call. The moment someone claims otherwise, the call must end.

The third is to bust a long-standing myth. At a certain age, many people resign themselves to dependence. They need help crossing the road. They need help carrying groceries. They may need help navigating hospital corridors. Due to all these reasons, they become comfortable relying on strangers for help, because their own family may not always be around. And slowly, that physical dependence bleeds into digital life. “Beta, you handle it.” “You check this.” “You talk to them.” That instinct is understandable, but it is precisely what scammers exploit. They create situations where the elderly feel overwhelmed and alone, and then demand immediate decisions.

The truth is simpler and far more empowering. Digital interactions do not require physical strength. They require pause. They require scepticism. They require the confidence to disconnect a call.

With a little awareness, our elderly do not need to surrender control of their digital lives. Five minutes of proactive awareness a day. A handful of non-negotiable rules. And the same indignation towards scammers that comes to the fore when they see their son wearing low waist jeans.

Small steps. Big impact. If we get this right, we’re doing much more and something much deeper than relying on creative slogans for awareness.

Digital Arrest is, hopefully, a cybercrime we’ve all heard about by now. And I can guarantee that 70% of those reading this post will go, “Oh, I know what this is.”

The question to ask, then, is this: How, despite all of us knowing about it, is this still the number one cybercrime in India today?

For those who may not know, the digital arrest scam works by convincing you that you are a criminal. Scammers call you up impersonating police officers, tell you that you are the subject of an active investigation and then make a video call to you. On that video call, they proceed to terrify you even further, telling you that you will be thrown in jail and that your only hope is to stay in this video call and cooperate. This ‘cooperation’ means transferring all your money to a ‘government account’, so that you can not ‘misuse it to hamper the investigation’. And you are forbidden from getting off that video call, because you are under ‘online’ or ‘digital arrest’.

When this scam began, it was ridiculously simple. The scammers would call you up saying, “I am from FedEx. We’re found drugs in a package addressed to you and if you pay me money, I won’t tell the cops.” Today, the scammers are impersonating serving police, CBI or ED officers by Googling their names and making video calls. Few of us realise what a powerful weapon this is. We’ve always been hardwired to believe that a scammer never shows his face. As soon as he makes that video call, half our trust is compromised.

But the bigger weapon that they have, and the reason why they keep succeeding in looting us to the tune of lakhs of rupees, is because they evolve continuously. They’re using AI language models to write ‘court summonses’ in perfect language. They’re using publicly available images to force government logos on their ‘arrest warrants.’ And most of all, they’re changing their stories to match ongoing current affairs.

For example, the old hooks are being quietly retired. “Drugs found in your parcel” and “Your bank account shows money laundering evidence” are hardly, if ever, used. What’s increasingly being used instead are references that short-circuit thought before it even begins. The latest hook used in digital arrest scams is, “Your number surfaced during an investigation connected to the recent Pulwama attacks.”

This was so unexpected that one of my friends, a former journalist herself, called me up saying she’d received a call from the NIA, telling her the above line. She didn’t part with any money, but she felt that twinge of fear nevertheless.

The line is then fine-tuned and improvised. ‘Your Aadhaar appeared in financial trails linked to terror funding.’ Or, ‘Your SIM was active in a larger national security case.’.

Digital arrest scams work so horrifyingly well because most awareness efforts miss the point. We keep teaching people to spot claims, when the real manipulation lies in the framing. The scammer is doing more than asking you to believe a story. They are placing you inside a situation where disbelief feels dangerous.

This is not abstract harm. In January 2025, an 82-year-old retired state government officer in Pune died of a heart attack shortly after realising he had lost ₹1.2 crore to a digital arrest scam. In another case reported the same year, an elderly couple in Bhilwara were kept on continuous video calls for nearly a week, effectively digitally imprisoned, until a bank manager intervened. In 2024, multiple reports emerged of female victims being coerced into undressing on camera under the pretext of “verification” during digital arrest calls. In 2023, a businessman in Telangana died by suicide days after losing his life savings in a digital arrest fraud, leaving behind a note describing the shame, fear and sense of helplessness he felt after being told he was implicated in a criminal investigation.

And here, my favourite term comes in: implementable awareness. You can have all the awareness in the world, but if you don’t know how to implement it, it is useless. Your awareness tells you that digital arrest scams exist. Your implementation tells us where to apply it. And it does not lie in the hook. The hooks will keep changing. There will always be sensitive or high profile cases under investigation and scammers will always keep using them as hooks.

And because our awareness is misplaced, we fail to implement it. The implementation here is quite simple. Forget all those long winded messages that you receive about how “ a police officer will never ask for money online” or how “this is how digital arrest works.” Implementation of awareness is as ridiculously simple as the scam is: No law in India lets any police unit conduct any interrogation, questioning or arrest over video call.” Period. The moment you hear them say that, hang up and block the number.

There is another uncomfortable truth we avoid acknowledging. That we, as a civilisation, are so willing to believe that the cops are demanding money from us, because, well, they do. Law enforcement today is struggling with the very image of itself that it has created, and no, saying civilians are equally guilty for paying those bribes is not the solution here. It’s just a way out, a convenient excuse. We have, over the years, become used to a system that lets us go scot free after slipping the Traffic cop a Rs 500 note. Why, then, should the Pulwama terror investigation be any different?

That, more than anything else, is why digital arrest still works.

In 2017, when I was reporting the crime beat at The Hindu, I was approached by a young woman with a horrific story to tell.

She was in her 20s, worked with a private firm and explored hobbies in her free time. Her family was reasonably well off and she had a lot of freedom from her parents to go out with friends and stay over. Two days before she approached me, she had gone out partying with some friends and ended up at the house of her male friend she had known since she was in Class 10; someone who had helped her with her studies back then. She went to sleep in his living room, the way she had countless number of times earlier. She woke up an hour ago, to find him on top of her.

If the above paragraph made you uncomfortable, I apologise. But it gets worse. She got in touch with me through a mutual friend and I took her to meet a senior police officer. The cop was sensitive and patient with her, and called up the concerned police station in front of us. He gave strict instructions to take immediate action and asked her to go and record her statement.

We left the cop’s office and the girl asked me what the chances were of her parents finding out if she registered a complaint. I didn’t want to lie to her and told her that once a complaint enters the system, the chances of exposure increase. I also told her that the police would do everything to minimize that exposure. She asked for a day to make up her mind, and later told me she’d decided to not file a complaint. “As soon as my parents get to know,” she said, “they’ll blame me for misusing the freedoms they gave me, and my life with turn into a living hell.”

The way I remember that incident is, “A rapist is still walking free because the victim was more scared of her parents than of him.”

While reading up on the Epstein Files, what kept jumping out at me was the fact that the victims tried to tell the world what was happening. Repeatedly. They were shut down. Discredited. Some of them even disappeared. And the horrors persisted and stayed hidden for years.

And today, when the files are finally out, there is… nothing. No action. No arrests. No raids. No justice.

As a civilisation, we believe in silencing the victims. And it begins early. We tell our five-year-old daughters to ‘cover up’ and ‘sit properly’, when it is actually the creepy uncle we should be chastising. We tell our teenage girls to ‘dress decently’ and come back at a ‘proper’ time, when we should be telling our sons to behave themselves when they’re with their female friends, or just around women in general. We tell our women to ‘let it go’ or ‘adjust’ when they come to us with their stories of assault or abuse.

When silencing them doesn’t work, we resort to doubting them. Because it’s easier for us to believe that our daughter is a liar, than to accept that our son is a molestor.

The same senior police officer once told me that 90% of sexual assault cases are never reported to the police. This is because the abuser is either in the family or known to the victim, and the victim feels she will be blamed. When you look at it objectively, it is pretty wild. A victim feels guilty that her abuser is in her family or friend circle, where as it should be the other way round.

Disbelief is frequently described as fairness. It is presented as caution, as restraint, as respect for due process. More often, it is emotional convenience. Accepting harm within a family or an institution is destabilising. It forces a reckoning with proximity and responsibility. Dismissing it preserves order. It allows life to continue uninterrupted. The choice rarely announces itself as denial. It arrives as relief.

This is how environments become predictable. Not safe, but reliable. Reliable in their responses. Reliable in their silences. Reliable in the knowledge that naming harm will be met with scepticism rather than urgency. Over time, those who cause harm learn this pattern. They do not need invisibility. They need assurance that discomfort will be managed quietly by others.

Cases like Epstein’s are often discussed as failures of law or enforcement. Those failures are real, but they are not the whole story. Long before courts or police are involved, social habits do their work. They decide which voices will be doubted, which truths will be softened, and which disruptions will be postponed indefinitely. There is a very clear connection; if a cop decides not to waste his time on a sexual assault case, it is because he knows that over the next few days, the victim is going to change her mind anyway. It does not let the cop off the hook. But it does place society firmly in the dock, and the sooner we address this, the more hope we can hold for a better tomorrow.

Cultures rarely collapse because of monsters alone. They falter because ordinary people learn which truths are easier not to name.