Last month my mother-in-laws’s gold chain was snatched. The plucky Mrs Khandekar, all of a sprightly 87, came home and dialled 100. Soon there were half a dozen policemen in our house. After over two hours of chatting they wrote down the complaint but kept dissuading us from filing an FIR. They asked us to think it over. When we called the next day to say we wanted to file an FIR, two policemen came around for a chat that lasted almost four hours. They were very polite but they just would not file the FIR no matter what we said.

I understand where the policemen were coming from. There are several chain-snatchings in our part of Delhi every day. If they filed FIRs for every one of them, the crime statistics would go haywire.