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Surviving Tihar: The Good, the Bad and the Nazi By Dr. Arindam Chaudhuri

An essay based on my experience inside Tihar. For the first time since my father's death last year, I was happy that he was no more, for, at his age, he wouldn't have been able to take this pain. And yet as I sit down to write this, there’s no one I miss more because my life was always about talks with him. And the only person who would have truly appreciated and actually understood and enjoyed this essay was him. I dedicate this to him.    A couple of months back a completely illegal arrest wrt to a service tax issue, made a magistrate send me to Judicial Custody in Tihar. At first, I was of course very angry, but by the time the formalities got completed, the anger changed into a quest for knowledge about a system that my father, Dr Malay Chaudhuri and I had written extensively about in our 2003 book 'The Great Indian Dream' (in the chapter 'Indian Jails: Innocents inside Criminals outside'). After all how many people with an interest in jail reforms get a cha