When Goa’s ex DySP met David Headley

VIKANT SAHAY & 

SUJAY GUPTA 

PANJIM: The manuscript of this book – “The Scout” was written on a mobile, primarily because Shirish Thorat, a co-author of this book was unable to type on a laptop. It was a real transformation from the olden era of hand writing to typing on mobile, thus bypassing the era which saw the advent of typewriters and laptops.

Shirish took early retirement in 2003 when he was posted at SDPO Panjim as Deputy Superintendent of Police. He served in Goa for over 10 years. His parents still stay in Goa as his father, MG Thorat, settled down in Goa after his retirement as Airport Director. Shirish studied at Cranfield University in UK and later was the chief investigator for Emirates Group in Dubai. Now based near New York in US, where he wrote the book. After ground research spread over the US, UK, Maldives, Bangladesh and a few undisclosed locations in the terror zone west of Afghanistan Thorat was sent on deputation to the Maharashtra police and worked on intelligence and counter terrorism operations and teamed with encounter specialist Sachin Waze who provided the ground level inputs for the book, on the 26/11 Operations and the police response.

“My co-author came up with this topic as some buzz was going around about David Headley and his role in the Mumbai attack,” said Thorat. 

During the attack Shirish was in Dubai but was aggrieved with the news of his friend Ashok Kamte’s death. “So, I started ferreting into it and my professional networks did help me from several countries to provide me information on this case. My co-author Sachin Waze is also an ex-cop and he too has his network of contacts,” said Thorat. 

Initially Thorat anticipated that this entire project will take about 15 days, but eventually, it turned out to be a nearly five and a half months of research as both the authors of this book started getting a lot of documents, many of which have not been published because of security reasons. Finally, they realised that the data and information collected was unraveling itself into a bigger story, unexpectedly.

“This made us think to at least put it together by writing it out and it took me about three months to write on my mobile. I cannot type properly as couple of my fingers are broken. Sometimes, my wife also pitched-in to type,” said Thorat. 

Soon after the manuscript was ready, they tried “Create Space” at Amazon but before it could fructify, Shirish’s LinkedIn contact, whom he had never met before, dropped in his house. He had to stay overnight in Shirish’s home in New York as the blizzard was too strong. This gave him the time to go through the manuscript and he helped Shirish to connect with the publishers of the Harry Potter novels, Bloomsbury. The entire process of completing the contract between the authors and the publishers virtually took less than 10 hours and the book saw the light of the day. 

Today, The Scout has been scouted and over 20,000 copies have already been sold out through Amazon.com and the publishers are in talks with authors for getting more prints for the avid readers.