Another IITian turns author. And Raj Tilak Roushan is quite an unusual IITian. An award-winning police officer, RTR, as he is known, spent five years in the private sector, both in India and abroad, after graduating from IIT Kharagpur, then got tired of “working to make rich people richer”, and joined the IPS. The story of his extraordinary work in Palghar, Maharashtra, in fighting child trafficking, involving both deep data analysis and sensitising his force (“think of every child missing as a child from your own family”) is here
The stories in RTR’s book are police procedurals. Most of them, if not all, are obviously based on real events. Many of them are disturbing, many don’t have happy endings—in some, there is not even any form of satisfying closure. Justice, in an ideal sense, is not always served. But this is real rural and small-town India in all its paradoxically complex rawness. These are real cases, real ethical and moral questions that our policemen have to grapple with every day and night.
Don’t expect great literary style. RTR writes simple matter-of-fact English, just telling it as it is, very rarely even passing any judgement on what his alter ego, Rishi the young IPS officer, encounters. Some of the perpetrators of the crimes may even be victims in their own ways. And a few of the stories could disturb people who may hold a somewhat one-dimensional view on some social issues. The book pens real tales about real India from a man who chose to serve society rather than have a cushy air conditioned career.
Author Bio:
Raj Tilak Roushan, a budding poet, an IITian and an IPS officer, is a proud father of a little daughter. Born in a remote village in Bihar, he was trained as an engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, where he received his B. Tech. and M. Tech. degrees. In 2013, Raj qualified for the prestigious Indian Police Service to serve the nation. He currently is an IPS officer in the Maharashtra cadre.
Raj has been awarded numerous accolades, including the Union Home Minister’s Medal for Excellence in Investigation, the FICCI Award for Smart Policing and the IIT KGP Young Alumni Achiever’s Award.A meticulous and methodical police officer, he strives to maintain the human touch with a citizen-centric approach to policing.
Book Reviewer Bio:
SANDIPAN DEB is an independent journalist. He has been Editor of The Financial Express, Managing Editor of Outlook and Founder-Editor of Outlook Money, Open and Swarajya magazines. He is the author of The IITians: How an Indian Institution and Its Alumni Are Reshaping the World; Fallen Angel: The Making and Unmaking of Rajat Gupta; and The Last War, a novel re-imagining the Mahabharata in the modern Mumbai underworld; and editor of Momentous Times, a volume to commemorate 175 years of the Times of India. His writings cover the spectrum from economy to culture, cricket to quantum physics, cinema to society, the future of technology to what keeps us human. He is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta.
