The RPF

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The presence of the RPF in India is seriously impossible to miss.  They’re everywhere.  Everywhere.  Every couple of blocks in the city, you’ll see a gang of two or three of them.  Usually at least one will have an AK-47 or other large-caliber gun.  I don’t really know why they have to have such big weapons, but they do.  They also all have mustaches, and wear a mostly brown uniform with a little bit of red.

 

To some extent it makes you feel safe.  You know that you’re probably not going to get shanked when there’s a police officer with an AK-47 standing literally twenty feet from you.

 

But at the same time, their incredibly number makes them a little bit unruly and pretty susceptible to corruption.  So even though they’re everywhere, if some local criminals have paid them off ahead of time, they would just sit there while they had their way with any passersby, which might be even more dangerous than just having no cops at all.  We actually had a tiny bit of a run-in with that.  Some people that we were talking to on the train the first night to Kodaikanal said that the RPF caught them with alcohol on the train, which was illegal.  They didn’t really threaten arrest, just said that they should “find a way to work this out,” and they ended up just paying them 200Rp ($4.50 US) and calling it a day.

 

I never had a problem with them.  Most of them spoke English and it was good to know that you had someone to ask for directions if you were lost other than the auto-rickshaw drivers who would never tell you where to go or give you an accurate guess at how far away it was.  We even considered bribing them!  Spencer and I got off our train to Ernakulum (right next to Cochin) WAY later than we were supposed to get back to the customs office, and we figured they’d be closing up for the night by the time we got there.  But we REALLY wanted to get to the ship for the night.  So what could we do?  Bribe some people!  We figured first we’d try bribing the customs office, and if that didn’t work we’d just go to the port and say, “Are you sure there’s no way that we can possibly work this out?”  And then take out our wallet, “No way at all?”  And then some money, “You sure…?”  And on and on.

But as it turned out, the customs office was open until like 7:30 that night because like 100 SAS kids got back late from a trip and SAS was NOT about to abandon them all in Cochin for the night, and so we just jumped in and were literally the very last people in line to get cleared to enter the ship that night.  And then we didn’t have to bribe the RPF.  Hooray!