In a world of maya, IPCIB can be real

You can't make things like this up. Six men were arrested in Noida for setting up and operating - wait for it - International Police and Crime Investigation Bureau. So, was IPCIB so undercover that even IB, CBI and R&AW were ignorant about the crime-fighting it was conducting from its website and Noida Phase 3 office? Nope, it was simply posing as a law-and-order institution with forged IDs, official-looking documents, and 'national' and 'international' documents. In the process, the gang of 'impressionists' extorted money under the pretext of verifications and inquiries. If it wasn't criminal, it would have been criminally funny.

Societies that value form over substance may be vulnerable to such 'Potemkin Village' operations, where the facade is accepted as the whole thing. All it takes is a wardi - you can buy it off the internet for under ₹2,000 - to be considered worthy. Coming as this bust does weeks after (real) police discovered a 47-yr-old Harshvardhan Jain operating a fake diplomatic mission from Ghaziabad as ambassador of Westarctica - an unrecognised micronation 'grand duchy' by occultist Travis McHenry in 2001 - we seem to be rich with fakers. Or, more likely, we have a surfeit of people gullible enough to fall for whatever they are told something or someone is. In a world of maya, you do tend to believe in everything.