Bunty the Bandit

Saw this in The Guardian....somewhat funny when I first read it...

He was Delhi's most wanted - an urban outlaw like a character from a Bollywood film, with dreams in his eyes and a gun in his hand. But the law caught up with 30-year-old Om Prakash, alias Bunty, this week when police shot dead the man who aspired to be India's most feared gangster.

For the past few months Bunty has been blamed for a one-man crimewave - shooting, stabbing and robbing his way into the news. Police say he had a hand in 41 murders, 19 of which were carried out since April when he gunned down three men within the space of a few hours.

Tagged by the authorities as a "BC", which stands for Bad Character, the worst kind of criminal, Bunty's speciality was to roar up to victims on flashy motorcycles, demand money and shoot dead anyone who refused. An ambitious, skinny man he revelled in the media spotlight - at his hideouts were newspaper cuttings of his criminal escapades.

Police held him almost solely responsible for a recent spate of violence, which led to accusations of a breakdown of law and order in India's capital, a city where many people are making lots of money coveted by criminal gangs.

The would-be kingpin was meticulous about evading capture. He slept little, never carried a mobile phone and wrote his contact numbers in codes. To avoid being stopped by police, Bunty dressed smartly and carried his weapons in a laptop bag so that he blended into the crowds of motorcycle-driving office workers.

Careful to the point of being paranoid, few knew where he would stay at night. One of his gang members said that he was so scared of losing his money that he slept on pillows stuffed with cash.

Bunty wanted to be a "don", one of the select few Indian gangsters who live a glamorous life in Dubai beyond the reach of law. To make sure he could start intimidating a better class of victim, he began learning English. When he was shot dead, Bunty was found with a bag containing a student's guide to learning English, a dictionary and a notebook where his first sentence was "Do you study English? Yes I do."

There is little doubt among police that Bunty was influenced by the glorification of violence and thuggery by Bollywood. Bunty's desire to speak English was straight out of a scene from a recent blockbuster, Tashaan, where a gangster made a point of speaking like a BBC presenter from the 1960s.

Ruthless with a penchant for extreme violence, Bunty had also inspired others - including a student at Delhi University - to mimic his life of crime.

In many ways, Bunty's ambitions are a reflection of the simmering desire to get ahead in India. He began life as a fairly unsuccessful small-time pickpocket in his teens before ending up in prison.

Released in 2005, he became a police informer - learning the tricks of the trade from the very men who would one day hunt him down.