‘12 most memorable minutes of my entire life’

Lens man Anand Shinde retraces his steps as he helped the police nab 2 bank robbers
Jan. 22: It was another day at work on Thursday and I was at the Malabar Hill police station to click photographs of diamond merchant and filmmaker Bharat Shah who was arrested after a court in Silvassa issued a warrant against him.
At around 1.10 pm after clicking some of Shah’s pictures, a fellow cameraman and me decided to follow the police van in which Shah was taken to the court to get some exclusive visuals. Little did I know that this decision would give me the most memorable twelve minutes of my life.
Just as we were chasing the police van, a white Maruti Suzuki Esteem brushed past me at full speed. The driver of the car did the same to the police vehicle. We thought that the driver was a rich spoilt brat using his father’s car, so we got to our job of clicking exclusive pictures again when at a distance we saw the car knocking down the traffic policeman who tried to stop it. I stopped my bike to check what happened. The police vehicle also halted to check on the injuries of the traffic policeman. At this point, the first thing that came to my mind was that the driver of the car was possibly a terrorist who was trying to dodge the police.
But the mystery unfolded when assistant inspector Ghanshyam Palange rushed towards me and asked me if I would be interested in chasing the car. Without a thought, I asked him to ride pillion and rode off. The car was zooming at over 80 kmph and I was riding at a speed of around 65 km per hour. During our chase we saw two people inside the car who looked like foreign nationals. The car then sped dangerously past a BEST bus and was later abandoned before the Raj Bhavan gate.
When we asked a passerby who left the car, he pointed towards a taxi. I then overtook the taxi and stopped in front of it. Mr Palange immediately got off the bike with his loaded service revolver and pointed it towards the robbers. The taxi driver got out of the cab and started shivering. Several people were watching the action from a distance.
Mr Palange then asked both of them to get out of the taxi but the duo started hurling abuse at him. The assistant inspector started abusing them in Marathi and then I intervened and told him to abuse them in English, the language they would understand. All this while, I was capturing every frame trying not to miss even a single exciting picture.
Finally, both of them were arrested and a police van took them to the police station.