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Home > News > Opinion News > Article > Flight of the eagles

Flight of the eagles

Updated on: 26 July,2010 09:41 AM IST  | 
J Dey |

When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber, goes an old adage. The adage is especially apt when it comes to controlling crime in the city. The eagles ufffd encounter specialists ufffd have been silent for far too long.

Flight of the eagles

When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber, goes an old adage. The adage is especially apt when it comes to controlling crime in the city. The eagles ufffd encounter specialists ufffdu00a0 have been silent for far too long.

The parrots, or the criminals, have not only begun jabbering but are also flying without fear. Their flight can be seen in the spiralling crime graph ufffd there have been no less than six shootouts in the city in the past four months.

What's sad is that the eagles have not been focused on change to get results. They are still stuck to the old style of functioning. They have yet to get rid of old memories and past traditions and take hard decisions so that they can complete their service to the citizens.


Ornithologists say the eagle can live for as long as seventy years and complete several cycles of a rebirth of sorts to get rid of symptoms like their wings becoming heavy, talons inflexible and beak bent after years of hunting.

A wise eagle flies to an isolated spot to undergo the painful process of change, which often lasts five months. The eagle repeatedly knocks its beak against a rock until he is able to pluck it. He waits till the new beak replaces the old one.

The new beak is then used to pull out the talons and, when the new talons grow, they are used to pluck the old feathers before its takes a flight of renewed vigour.

Similarly, an encounter specialist has little choice but to take hard decisions like the wise eagle. If he doesn't, he can get entangled in a legal battle, fall prey to the whims of seniors and be sidelined.

The government may have to start a process of change if they have to take control of the crime scene. The encounter specialists too should focus on change to get new targets.


There are, in fact, no eagles left in the city. The death of police inspector Vijay Salaskar ended a two-decade long campaign against the underworld by the encounter specialists of the 1983 IPS batch. Twenty members of the batch gunned down around 600 gangsters between 1995 and 2001.

Almost all the eagles have gone into hibernation and this species may soon get extinct. Many have been kept on the sidelines.

It may be too late to do anything once the parrots take charge ufffdu00a0 many more lives would have been lost by then.


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