“Dar gayaa! Dar gayaa!” (He’s scared! He’s scared!)

One of two men on a motorcycle behind me shouts, as I ride mine back home from work last evening.

“WadhaaiyaaN! aaja hor wadhaaiyaaN devaaN!” (Congratulations! Come let me congratulate you even more!), I shout back and slow down.

As he passes me, he says, “Sir, aap se nahiN keh rahaa thha, peechhe kisi se keh rahaa tha.” (Sir, I wasn’t saying anything to you, I was saying it to someone else back there.). Then he speeds away, without any sign of the fictitious person he was supposed to have been shouting upon back there following him.

A few minutes earlier, while I was at work, one of my colleagues, who was not within my line of sight said, loud enough for me to hear, “ab ye apne pinD bhaagega!” (Now he will run back to his village. He deliberately used the Punjabi word ‘pinD’ for village, so that I would have no doubt I was the one being spoken to, while hiding his face to remain anonymous).

Even as I write this, my mother calls to ask me why I had called her a minute ago (She could see my name appear on her mobile phone’s screen, as the Phone rang, but got disconnected before she could take the call.). I tell her it wasn’t me, but those who have hacked/cloned my mobile phone who were actually making the call. At times, she calls me and the call gets disconnected without me doing anything and no missed call notification appears either.

These are among the psychological warfare and dirty trick department tactics, such as tampering with and trying to sabotage my motorcycle, which ‘they‘ are applying at present against me.

Their campaign against me is broadly comprised of two components:

1. Psychological warfare
2. Dirty tricks

Psychological warfare

This includes tactics, which I have named as follows:

1. duur duur se bolo (DDSB) (Speak from afar): They talk from afar, either without me seeing them or, if I do see them, while pretending to talk to someone else or while their faces are turned to another side or they are not directly looking at me, to maintain deniability. This tactic is applied almost 24 hours a day, regardless of where I am.
2. bol-bol ke bhaago (BBKB) (Speak and run away): This is done usually while they are riding/driving in a vehicle, so that they can make their comments and then make a quick getaway, with less likelihood of me catching them, even if their comments are a bit risque. This generally happens when I am walking or riding my motorcycle down the road.
3. gaaDi bhagaao (GB) (Run vehicles fast): Vehicles are driven in a threatening manner, to make me feel like I am in the danger of being run over or struck by a vehicle. This again happens while I am walking or riding the motorcycle.
4. Road games: Examples: Someone opens a car door, while I am about to ride past and there is a vehicle driven at high speed coming from behind. A vehicle driving in front goes at a slow speed and another comes at a higher speed from behind or the opposite direction, when I am about to ride past. A number of vehicles form a line and try to prevent me from going on straight, near a turn. Vehicles without headlights turn suddenly on to the road in front of me, from adjoining roads. Bottle-necks are created artificially to pressurise me. DDSB and BBKB are applied in abundance while I am riding, to try and break my concentration and push me into making an involuntary mistake. These tactics keep evolving and new ones are added to the repertoire almost every day to try to surprise me and to cause physical hurt, if possible, along with the psychological impact these are desired to have on me.
5. Zombies: I have written extensively about this tactic in a previous blog post.

Dirty tricks

These include tricks such as:

1. Phone hacking: My Android mobile phone is rendered useless for the time being, after it failed to connect to the internet even after I acquired and activated a duplicate SIM card. Also, it was performing a lot of involuntary actions such as taking photos on its own, disconnecting calls on its own without even giving a missed call notification, opening all sorts of screens and applications on its own, typing out messages even without me as much as lifting a finger. The feature phone I am using in its place also dialled a call on its own a few minutes ago, as I have written about above. I performed a factory data reset on the Android phone several times and even got the Android OS wiped and re-installed by my brother, but to no avail. I even installed a firewall, but they still managed to hack the phone repeatedly.
2. Motorcycle tampering and sabotage: I have been trying to get the front disk-brake of my motorcycle to function perfectly for some time now, getting components such as disk pads and disk pen replaced more than once, but problems recur, despite brand new components of original-equipment quality being installed. Also, short circuits keep occurring and disappearing in the bike’s headlight and parking lights. I have no doubt that it is being tampered with and sabotage attempts being made while the bike is parked either in the hostel/paying-guest accommodation I reside in or while it is parked in the basement of the office building at work.
3. Poisoning: I got a stomach infection deadlier than I have ever suffered from before and was admitted in a hospital where the medical staff had a lot of trouble getting the infection under control. It resulted, I believe, from a bottle of orange juice I purchased from a shop near the hostel. A few days after I was released from hospital, I got a similar infection again, this time from a glass of juice from a reputed juice shop near the office. However, the second time round I had a better idea of the strong antibiotics required to bring the infection under control and recovered faster. I haven’t really been drinking juice since then. Notably, the first infection didn’t come from the first bottle of juice I purchased from that shop. It was the second bottle. I think ‘they’ were keeping watch as usual, and sprung at the opportunity resulting from my propensity to drink juice on the way back from my evening walk.