Hats off To every1 assosiated today (Page 5)

Dear Tani & Sanchayita,

I agree that Rathore was finally  given his due today, and I am glad both of you noticed and appreciated that. The ETF  is after all a team, and Rathore is a very thorough and conscientious, if somewhat conventional police officer. All he lacks is imagination - the ability to think out of the box and from under the guilty party's skin -  which is naturally the sole preserve of our boy wonder Arjun!

The second crucial point  made by Rathore was Kevin da Costa was a Catholic, and so he would have been buried, not cremated, as Sandhya was, and so his remains would be available for a post mortem to determine if he dies due a poison. That was an even more crucial point than the discovery of the earring. It is another matter that the first exhumation attempt fails due to the 'castling' technique from chess having been very cleverly adapted to his own ends by Hiten, by exchanging the headstones.

Two other points come to mind in this context. Exchanging two such large and heavy headstones could not have been easy, and how did Hiten do this undetected in a graveyard? He would have had to work at night, and if the caretaker had caught him he would have been in trouble. If he had bribed him to keep quiet, there would always have been the risk of subsequent blackmail.

Secondly, for all his cleverness and smugness, it is Hiten who digs his own grave, so to speak, by explaining the 'castling' move to Arjun in a fit of arrogant condescension. If he had not done that, Arjun would not have been able to figure out how Kevin's supposed body turned out to be clean, and he would have been stuck.

In the end, Hiten's ability to outthink his opponent fails, because he goes only one step, not two ahead, concerning what he assumes in an exchange of the glasses. Arjun, in contrast,  goes the full two steps - he knows that Hiten will assume that he has indeed exchanged the glasses and will pick up the other one, and he spikes him by doing nothing at all. This was  the cleverest thing he does that evening, cleverer than the acid reflux hoax, for he manages to outsmart a man whose speciality is thinking  2 steps ahead of his opponent, and this without even being a chess expert!

That passage reminded me of the showdown between Sherlock Holmes, the most famous fictional detective of all time, and his nemesis Professor Moriarty. It came down there too, in The Final Problem,  to Holmes outthinking Moriarty in exactly the same fashion, though the actions were quite different. I do not want to bore you with more details, but if any of you is at all interested in pure detection, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are an excellent read even today, 130 years after the first was written.

In fact, I think Arjun has a lot of Holmes in his characterisation - with the same arrogance of intelligence, the same contemptuous impatience with lesser minds, the same abruptness and lack of social skills. But then Holmes was never part of any team, nor was he a policeman. Arjun is both, and so some fine tuning seems called for to smoothen out his rough edges , which I think is happening.

Sorry to have inflicted such a long response on you young ladies, but I am glad Tani did a special on yesterday's excellent episode, which I liked a lot, whence these amplifications that I hope you and some others might find of interest.

Shyamala B.Cowsik

Dear Tani & Sanchayita,

I agree that Rathore was finally  given his due today, and I am glad both of you noticed and appreciated that. The ETF  is after all a team, and Rathore is a very thorough and conscientious, if somewhat conventional police officer. All he lacks is imagination - the ability to think out of the box and from under the guilty party's skin -  which is naturally the sole preserve of our boy wonder Arjun!

The second crucial point  made by Rathore was Kevin da Costa was a Catholic, and so he would have been buried, not cremated, as Sandhya was, and so his remains would be available for a post mortem to determine if he dies due a poison. That was an even more crucial point than the discovery of the earring. It is another matter that the first exhumation attempt fails due to the 'castling' technique from chess having been very cleverly adapted to his own ends by Hiten, by exchanging the headstones.

Two other points come to mind in this context. Exchanging two such large and heavy headstones could not have been easy, and how did Hiten do this undetected in a graveyard? He would have had to work at night, and if the caretaker had caught him he would have been in trouble. If he had bribed him to keep quiet, there would always have been the risk of subsequent blackmail.

Secondly, for all his cleverness and smugness, it is Hiten who digs his own grave, so to speak, by explaining the 'castling' move to Arjun in a fit of arrogant condescension. If he had not done that, Arjun would not have been able to figure out how Kevin's supposed body turned out to be clean, and he would have been stuck.

In the end, Hiten's ability to outthink his opponent fails, because he goes only one step, not two ahead, concerning what he assumes in an exchange of the glasses. Arjun, in contrast,  goes the full two steps - he knows that Hiten will assume that he has indeed exchanged the glasses and will pick up the other one, and he spikes him by doing nothing at all. This was  the cleverest thing he does that evening, cleverer than the acid reflux hoax, for he manages to outsmart a man whose speciality is thinking  2 steps ahead of his opponent, and this without even being a chess expert!

That passage reminded me of the showdown between Sherlock Holmes, the most famous fictional detective of all time, and his nemesis Professor Moriarty. It came down there too, in The Final Problem,  to Holmes outthinking Moriarty in exactly the same fashion, though the actions were quite different. I do not want to bore you with more details, but if any of you is at all interested in pure detection, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are an excellent read even today, 130 years after the first was written.

In fact, I think Arjun has a lot of Holmes in his characterisation - with the same arrogance of intelligence, the same contemptuous impatience with lesser minds, the same abruptness and lack of social skills. But then Holmes was never part of any team, nor was he a policeman. Arjun is both, and so some fine tuning seems called for to smoothen out his rough edges , which I think is happening.

Sorry to have inflicted such a long response on you young ladies, but I am glad Tani did a special on yesterday's excellent episode, which I liked a lot, whence these amplifications that I hope you and some others might find of interest.

Shyamala B.Cowsik