Kindle Notes & Highlights
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Graham Greene, Jane Austen, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie and Jeffrey Archer.
Arun Shourie had ripped apart A. R. Antulay in the cement scam, and Maneck Davar exposed the link between Dhirubhai Ambani’s Reliance Industries and the Central Bureau of Investigation director Mohan Katre. (Davar posed as a small scale detergent manufacturer and entrapped Katre’s son Umesh into revealing his business dealings with Reliance.)
Page 3 social scene idea was just incubating in some party-hopper’s mind.
The late chief of the Anti Terror Squad (ATS) Hemant Karkare, Customs Inspector Farooq Batatawala, Deputy Commissioner of Police Deepak Jog, ganglord Hussain Shaikh alias Ustara, Dilawar Khan, killed at twenty-eight, and Badshah,
Hussain’s story, ‘Gangster’s Shame Cannot Cock a Gun’, which was carried as a lead story in the Express Newsline, is a case in point. It was the first article on crime that took a derisive line and denigrated mafia hitmen. The mafia across the board were not at all amused by that story.
Hussain managed to have contacts in most of the top gangs, including Dawood, Chhota Shakeel, Abu Salem, Chhota Rajan and even Arun Gawli. Then there was the P gang. The Mumbai police force.
Ustara was a gangster who hated Dawood’s Man Friday, Chhota Shakeel.
I particularly remember one scene in The New Police Story, where the ageing and washed-out cop, played by Jackie Chan, would lose to a nimble-fingered younger gunman who was always faster and quicker.
Mauser pistol (1914 model)—the
Vikram Chandra, the internationally famous author of several bestselling books, including Love and Longing in Bombay, Red Earth and Pouring Rain and The Sacred Games.
Farooq’s story read like a quintessential Bollywood tale. He had a childhood friend, someone he played gilli danda and cricket with. However, as they grew up, they parted ways. While Farooq became a law-enforcing officer, his friend instead chose a different path that led to him becoming an outlaw, a don. This friend was none other than Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar.
Though Manmohan Singh had declared our own perestroika and glasnost in 1992, old habits die hard and smuggling as a way of life had yet to lose its appeal.
Known as the Wild West of India, Uttar Pradesh is famous, or infamous, depending on how you look at it, for its country-made guns.
Like any smart gangster, Dawood and Shakeel realized that Jhingada had killed too many people too fast, and was attracting a lot of heat. The usual solution to the problem would have been to arrange a ‘tip-off’ to an encounter specialist and close the account forever. However, this time, Dawood had something else on his mind; something that he could use Jhingada for.
Their opportunity came when the former IB chief Ajit Doval, hero of Operation Blue Star, hatched a plan to eliminate Dawood.
‘Saab, he does not want alcohol, he wants a bottle of blood.’
Jiski nazar game se hati, woh game se hata (The one who loses focus in the game, loses the game).
Remember Vivek Oberoi from Shootout at Lokhandwala? The spunky, crazy, unpredictable, volatile gangster he portrayed on screen was quite close to an actual hitman: Maya Dolas.
It is a day to mourn Imam Hussain, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad, killed barbarically by a tyrannical ruler, Yazid, in the year 680 AD in Karbala, which is now in modern Iraq.
The guts of the gunman is always more crucial than the gears of the gun.
Misha Glenny
McMafia.
One of them was Shaikh Mohammed Ehtesham, charged with being part of the team that received the arms and ammunition in Raigad, while the other, Baba Moosa Chauhan, was charged with delivering AK-56 automatic rifles to the residence of actor Sanjay Dutt.
bête noire,
‘Yeh duniya mein sirf do cheezein hai dhanda aur danda (This world has only two important things—business and danda—which usually means a rod but is also used as a euphemism for the phallus).’
The jeweller closed his eyes and thought of God, waiting for the flying bullet to blow his brains. Umar summoned all his anger and pulled the trigger. Seconds ticked away. Nothing happened. Then an ugly sound of ‘khat’ echoed in the shop.
Umar trained the gun and pulled the trigger. And again nothing happened. In desperation, Umar began to pull the trigger repeatedly, hoping for the gun to sputter to life.
