THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF DARJEELING
Sandip C. Jain

Remember the Bermuda Triangular… that infamous expanse of the deep seas off the coast of the Caribbean where ships, all thousands of tons of them, just disappeared into thin air while voyaging through it???
Has Darjeeling too become a miniature version of the Bermuda Triangular? The only difference being that here people seem to vanish into thin air rather than ships. It sure seems to have become one- how else could one explain someone just disappearing like as though it’s a magic trick, that too all of a sudden and that too someone who had been the center of attraction for the entire media, the entire political fraternity as well as the law enforcers??? Yes I am talking of the mysterious disappearance of Lakpa Rynden who just managed to evaporate off the face of this earth.
The prime accused in the over 5 crore Sarva Siksha Abhiyan scam, Rynden, ideally should have and I am sure was a watched man. By watched I mean our guys in the Intelligence Bureau must have been definitely keeping their radars tuned towards Rynden after the scam surfaced into the public eye. Ideally, being people who are paid their salaries just to keep their eyes and ears open our very own Sherlock Homes should have been following every single footstep Rynden took and every singly word that he uttered- so what happened to these guys while Rynden was packing his bags and stashing his ill gotten fortune before making a clean get away???
If my knowledge of the English language is even fair enough, which I hope it is being the editor of an English newsmagazine, I think this entire disappearance affair is what they call in the English language as an “Intelligence failure “.
What is even more shocking is that no one seems concerned enough to ask why or how Rynden was allowed such a clean get away. It’s a shame that someone with as noted a face and someone as high ranking a bureaucrat as Lakpa Rynden is allowed to vanish without a trace that too when we have people who are paid just so that crooks like these do not get away so easily.
The Intelligence guys still have a chance to redeem their image and they can do so by finding out where the scamster is before he has the opportunity to fully swallow up the money, which was actually meant for our children.