[sadhuji]

Crime is as old as mankind and those who commit crimes find nothing wrong in it. A proverb goes – crime does not pay. But, the criminal nurses a feeling that he has been wronged. He also believes that it is his birthright to set the records straight. Hence, his inherent urge to commit that society considers as a crime – it leads to a tearful end.

Pravin Mahajan took the life of his brother and has been sentenced to life imprisonment, a teenager of Gurgaon shot down his class mate and is awaiting trial, another teenager in West Bengal knifed a girl because she refused to marry him, and the shootout in America of two post graduate students of Indian origin in Louisiana are examples of how violent the world has become. One remembers Lady Macbeth. Today it is a constant fight for proving ones superiority over others - whether it is the ma-in-law over the daughter-in-law or the thieves over innocent victims or one political party over its rivals – murders are on the rise. The cases are open and shut cases with detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot hardly getting any calls. There is no mystery that the police cannot solve – once the law zeroes in on the suspect, he is taken into custody and in a majority of the cases, a confession emerges. The Law knows how to extract confessions. However, if it is a political vendetta, the culprits would never get convicted – if at all they are put behind bars, they would return to freedom on bail within hours to torment the witnesses. The charges would usually be bailable ones.

Therefore, the profession of private detectives has taken a serious beating. Those of the clan who still exist eke out their living by keeping tabs on erring husbands or wives or following up leads of business malpractices or extracting the life history of prospective employees or would-be brides or grooms. Others specialize in locating lost puppies and return them to their rightful owners while some have joined hands to set up agencies that take care of guard duties of multistoried buildings or multiplexes.

[jyotirmoy]

So Deepak Chatterjee, Bomkesh Bakshi, Feluda are history?

[sadhuji]

jyotirmoy, on Dec 22 2007, 04:19 AM, said:

So Deepak Chatterjee, Bomkesh Bakshi, Feluda are history?

unfortunately yes.

[noflylist]

Did a search of wikipedia:

Quote

Byomkesh Bakshi is a fictional detective in Bengali literature created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. The advocate-turned-litterateur Bandyopadhyay was deeply influenced by the different Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown stories as well as the "tales of ratiocination" produced by Edgar Allan Poe. He was, however, concerned with how the Indian and Bengali fictional detectives created between 1890 and 1930 had failed to exist as something other than mere copies of the Western (and particulalry English) fictional detectives. All the stories of Dinendra Kumar Ray's Robert Blake, Panchkari Dey's Debendra Bijoy Mitra or Swapan Kumar's Deepak Chatterjee were almost always set in London or in Kolkata which was identifiably the British metropolis. It was almost as a postcolonial response that Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay introduced the Bengali 'bhadrolok' (gentleman) sleuth Byomkesh Bakshi and Ajit Banerjee (Byomkesh's associate and narrator) in "Pather Kanta" in 1932, and began to write of them as investigating in an Indian metropolis - the capital of British India until 1911 - that has had been thoroughly Indianised. Initially serialized in the literary magazine Basumati, the stories and novels were all eventually published in hardcover editions, the first being Byomkesher Diary.

The detective was picturized in a film (Chiriyakhana or The Zoo) by Satyajit Ray, starring Uttam Kumar in 1967. It has also been televised in Hindi by Doordarshan by Basu Chatterjee, featuring Rajit Kapur.

[sadhuji]

!Noflylist, on Dec 23 2007, 07:00 PM, said:

Did a search of wikipedia:

yes, the film was a hit.