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How a thief should come and go

THE recent break-in at the apartment of Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan was, by all accounts, a shoddy job. Thieves of yore would not have touched him with a barge pole! My career in the police taught me that professional...
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THE recent break-in at the apartment of Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan was, by all accounts, a shoddy job. Thieves of yore would not have touched him with a barge pole!

My career in the police taught me that professional burglars and thieves followed a strict code of discipline and procedure; they were trained by masters who had perfected the art of thievery. This was a profession where brains were more important than brawn. In the instant case, however, the use of a knife to attack Saif could have been avoided, had there been due compliance with the rules of the game.

The tribe of professional thieves claims that thieving was one of the 64 art forms prescribed by some ancient Sanskrit texts, though it is doubtful whether the term Hastalaghava could be interpreted as ‘theft’; it would, more aptly, mean ‘sleight of hand’.

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Some gangs also claim that Skanda or Kartikeya, one of the sons of Lord Shiva and Parvati, is their patron god.

Manoje Basu, a Bengali writer, in his Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Nishikutumba, later translated into English by Sachindralal Ghosh as I Come As A Thief (1971), spells out the attributes of a perfect thief, and how the master trains his ‘disciple’ in the art, less with theory and more with hands-on practice. He eschews lone-wolf adventures, which apparently was the case in the incident at Saif’s residence, and lays stress on teamwork, with informers, scouts, operators and receivers playing their assigned role. As per reports in the media, the thief had no prior information about the apartment’s occupants and the ‘goodies’ lying therein. He walked up barefoot with his face covered, but made the mistake of coming down with boots on and face uncovered.

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According to Basu’s book, a well-trained thief ought to sharpen his ears and depend more on ‘hearing’ than ‘seeing’, for he has to operate at night. Thus, with his ears pressed to the wall, he should be able to judge how many people are there in the room on the other side and how many are awake or sleeping, what is their gender, age and whether they are married. All this, only by their chatter or the sound of their breathing. The information is regarded as essential to fine-tune the strategy and timing of the break-in.

The practice of walking barefoot has to be perfected to an extent that one can walk on dried leaves of a peepal tree without producing any sound.

The ultimate test of the pupil so trained is to send him on an errand to remove the gold bracelets from the forearm of a newly married woman, sleeping alone, without her being able to sense it at all. Alas, the tribe of such proficient thieves is vanishing; they are being replaced by those like the one who entered Saif’s apartment, resorted to violence and eventually got caught.

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