A case quite bizarre

Indrani Mukerjea: Buried Truth (2024)
Docu-series, 4 episodes.

From the land of the Veda and the Arthashashtra comes an intriguing case of a missing person, which has remained unresolved to date. In the land that believes that every nasty action has a compelling reaction with the belief that no evil deed will not go unpunished in this birth or next, perhaps punishment could only be meted out in the next life.

In 2008, The Wall Street Journal hailed Indrani Mukerjea as one of the 50 ladies to watch, and India conferred her with the award 'Uttar Ratna' for her outstanding work in the art, media, and broadcasting sector. By 2015, she had her hands full fending off money laundering charges and fighting a murder charge.

Her past is blurry for a start. Born Pori Dora, her actual birthdate is queried. In her early teenage years in Guwahati, Assam, she accused her father of sexually molesting her. She went off to Shillong, Meghalaya, for studies, where she met her first husband, Siddharta Das, with whom she had two kids, Sheena and Mikhail. She soon left her kids with her parents to move to Kolkata in 1990. In Kolkata, she married her second husband, Sanjeev Khanna, to have her third child, Vidhie. Vidhie is the main narrator in the documentary. Somewhere along the way, there is even a mention that Sheena could be the product of Indrani's father's despicable act.

In 2001, Indrani moved to Mumbai, where she met Peter Mukerjea. Her recruitment company became a hit, and she dabbled in the media industry. Together with Peter, they climbed the corporate ladder to become prominent figures in Indian media. She was the CEO of a media mogul.

Her daughter, Sheena, appeared in the Mukerjea fold in 2006. Indrani introduced her to her new family as her sister! Sheena also got herself embroiled in the Mumbai corporate rat race. She apparently had a relationship with Peter's son from a previous marriage. Indrani's side was resistant to this relationship.

By 2009, Indrani was pretty much out of the media limelight as her corporate rule went south with accusations of appropriation and money laundering. She left India to live in the UK.

In 2012, Sheena disappeared without a trace. Everybody assumed Sheena had run away from her fiance and had probably gone incognito. Three years later, Indrani was arrested for the murder. Indrani's driver admitted to having helped her to kill and bury Sheena. The driver let her to the remains, but DNA evidence from the body was rejected for technical reasons. The case was twisted, and Indrani, Peter, and the driver got out on bail.

The docu-series is so twisted. It smells of sensationalism and trial by the media. Nobody shows sensitivity to the deceased or the family in the programme. I guess it does not matter as the accused is family (the mother killing her firstborn). The family gave the green light to tell their side of the story, having been in the media, knowing how well media can spin the truth, of which Indrani had been part and that the case is still ongoing; Indrani and the family should know better. Perhaps they are just garnering public sentiments before the case gets mentioned again.

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Only theories, nothing more.

MH 370: The Plane that Disappeared(2023, Netflix)
3-part Documentary

"Good night, Malaysia 370!" Those were the last words before Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah disappeared with his Boeing 777, 227 passengers from 14 nations and 12 crew members into thin air in the early hours of 8th March 2014 en route to Beijing.

Nine years later, the world is still clueless about how an aircraft as big as a building could disappear without evidence. In an era when we may be at the cusp of discovery of the Higgs boson (God) particle, and we can convict a politician with denatured DNA from semen deposited three days previously, we are still unable to make head or tail to a Boeing plane's whereabouts. All the satellites and tracking devices that monitor our every move simply failed to comprehend its fate after it went off the radar after 0130hrs. External communications and transponder signals simultaneously disappeared after entering the Vietnamese air space.

This documentary series has yet to shed any new information on the disappearance of MH370. We know now that all communications went kaput after reaching Vietnam before the Vietnamese ground control could get in touch. A telecommunication tower on Penang Island picked up signals from the co-pilot's mobile phone hours after the vessel went missing. The incompetent Malaysian Airforce towers picked an aberrant signal in the Straits of Malacca. Unfortunately, they could not make head or tail on the origin or meaning. They could not confirm whether it was a flying object at all. I remember reading from the local dailies that a junior officer who noticed the signal decided not to disturb his superiors from their beauty sleep, fearing retributions.

Then somebody suggested seeing a possible satellite image of an aeroplane in the South China Sea. Nothing was found by patrolling Navy ships. Imersat telecommunication satellite opined they may have had pinging cues from MH 370 somewhere along the Indian Ocean. The trouble was that they could pinpoint its exact location. For all they knew, it could extend from the Arabian Sea all the way to the turbulent South Seas. None of the observation towers in Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar or India had reported the passing of an unaccounted Boeing 777. Apparently, the policeman of the world, the USA, and Boeing are also in the dark about its locale.

Its black box was never discovered. Neither was any debris found despite extensive combing of oceans and beaches. Almost 15 months after the mishap, large chunks of plane parts belonging to the ill-fated plane made their presence in Reunion Island and Mozambique. The fact that a shady maverick in the vein of Indiana Jones found it and not a single boatman sighted it at sea raised suspicion about whether the evidence was planted. I remember there were some mysterious deaths of officials around the time of these discoveries.

As it stands now, there are only wild conspiratory theories to explain the whole fiasco. Still, none of them manages to correlate all the shreds of evidence we have so far. Then there is a question of which of the findings is indeed credible. Occam's razor principle suggests that when one encounters a problematic crossroad, the more plausible explanation is, the simpler one. As they say, "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." The problem is that all clues are equally compelling and are backed with scientific or pseudo-scientific convincing explanations.

 

Science and logic go out of the window in the modern world. Facts are sometimes stranger than fiction. The 6-tonne elephant in the room has yet to speak. Despite many of the victims being Chinese, China decided to play silent.

MH370 disappeared in Vietnam, a China vassal state. Search parties have searched a vast area, minus territories, under the umbrage of the CCP. There were talks of suspicious cargo on the plane. It was once mentioned to be mangosteens, even though it was off-season. Then there was talk of people travelling with fake Pakistani passports. At that time, the murmur was that the cargo was drones from Afghanistan meant to be delivered to the Urghurs. Another mention was some high-fi computer technology in the aviation industry. The passenger lists also included high-profile personalities of interest to the USA attending a computer conference in Beijing.

Is it possible that the whole thing is a nicely executed perfect crime by the CCP? Once MH 370 entered Vietnam airspace, it took control of the entire aeroplane, disarmed its connectivity to the outside world, brought it down to a safe space in its territory, dismantled whatever it needed to and cleaned up all pieces of evidence. With increasing curiosity, it simply fed the world with elements of evidence to confuse everyone.

That is what we are left with, only conspiracy theories. In a world of information overload, no one is sure of anything. With MH17 being shot down by Russia-sponsored Ukranian terrorists so soon after the MH370 fiasco, there is a question of whether there is a Russian hand in this mess.

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All talk, no results!

The disappearance of  Madeline McCann (Documentary, 2019)
Netflix

The work of policing and prosecuting evolved in modern societies to protect its citizen. It was thought that solid police and robust legal systems would ensure peace and harmony. No wrongdoer would go unpunished, and the system is supposed to deter crime.

But looking at how the whole system has turned out to be, instead of protecting the very people it is supposed to shield, it is inconveniencing them.

Aggrieved parties who report a crime are instead having the table turned against them. The whole machinery of defending one's innocence has begun to be so cumbersome, costly and convoluted that upholding one's good name remains in the domain of the rich.

Having investigations and litigations go on and on like forever gives no peace of mind to any party but a reason of existence for civil servants to push pencils. These are further fueled by media that cries wolf and create a mountain out of a mole of every questionable information that pops up in the public domain every now and then. Many of these are just half-truths at best. Sometimes informants just want that one minute of the limelight before their evidence crumples, but not before causing many inconveniences to all parties, except the media. The media just increases their sales. 

The media does not call this misinformation but merely informs the public about how things of public interest develop. 

This 2003 case of a missing 4-year-old British girl, Madeline McCann, while on a family holiday in Portugal is probably the most reported case of a missing person in the world. It was reported as an abduction of a young child and made many dizzying turns in its prolonged investigation.

The McCanns were on vacation in Praia de Luz with their three kids and five other friends with five children. Madeline went missing from her bed in her room when the adults were having their dinner nearby. The police were called in. The investigations started but proceeded nowhere. With little evidence to go on, the police looked at the parents as possible criminals.

Then it started. The circus of trial by media, accusations of the parents being involved in their child's disappearance, accidental killing by parents, conspiracial cover-up by fellow holiday-maker friends, paedophilic tendencies of a Good Samaritan and the list went on. At one stage, the parents were even interrogated as the accused. 

The parents, of their accord, created a national alert (and possibly international) for their missing child. Years after seeing that their daughter was nowhere to be found, they hired a reputable private investigator with the help of a philanthropist. It led to nowhere too. Then came the American investigators. At the end of the day, they realised that everyone promised more than they can deliver. More than 16 years after Madeline's disappearance, despite all the advancements in tracking and investigative tools, neither she nor her abductor had been found.

This case only exposed the cavalier attitude of the Portuguese police and the predatorial nature of the British tabloid. It further opened a big can of worms into the darkest nook of the Dark Web -child pornography

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