Rajasthan youth ‘steals’ Kolkata cop poems, held

KOLKATA: He had posed as an IPS officer who loved shayaris. But then, it was not ordinary when vegetable seller Vinod Ali from Jaipur in Rajasthan started to pass off the shayaris written by a senior IPS officer in Kolkata Police as his own.
As the IPS officer, whose love for Urdu and shayaris go much beyond police circles, decided to initially ignore, Ali did the unthinkable.He used multiple photographs of the IPS officer and began posting the poems written by the officer as his own. The cyber cell finally cracked the IP address and arrested Ali this weekend. But after some initial questioning, the cops did not contest his bail petition.
“I was convinced that he had no evil intention or motive. He loves shayaris genuinely and might have got a bit carried away. I am not one to take this personally,” said the IPS officer when TOI spoke to him on Tuesday.
Police sources said that Ali was asked to reveal the sources from where he collected the photographs of the officer. “He might have borrowed the pen name from a film he watched when he was young,” said the officer. The IPS officer has several published Urdu books in his name.
“Urdu is never a language of a particular community and around 75% of Urdu words have their etymological roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit and approximately 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit,” the IPS officer had told the police journal Protector some time ago.
During his childhood, the article had stated, he used to attend nashishts (sittings) of Urdu poets and would listen without letting them know that he wrote ghazals as well. As he was not well versed with meters, he was not keen to let others know about his ghazals. He has time and again stated how a Maulana of a mosque near his office was teaching him Urdu for quite some years.