CRACKING THE LIAR, EXPOSING THE LIE- CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

DETECTING A LIE,   HOW TO CATCH A LIAR,  HUMAN BEHAVIOR,  EXPLORING THE HUMAN MIND-  CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

I have been watching Bigg Boss season 6, since it started, a month ago. The Foreign equivalent is Big Brother- where a group of people stay for 3 months in a confined home, with about 70 cameras , equipped with night vision, monitoring every inch and second of their progress.

It is NOT about peeping into private lives, it is about peeping into the human psyche and mind.

For the past 3 decades, as a ship Captain , I have been putting my own mind into test. Every time and new Officer or a crew member joins, I make him sit down , when he first reports to me in my cabin, with his documents.  I ask him a few open ended questions --like "How was your flight?" etc.

Then I say welcome on board and shake hands with him again. I miss out NOTHING!

After he leaved my cabin, I write down what I think about him--an initial gut feeling assessment  Then a time comes when he signs off , or I sign off. 

At this time I have to make his service report or appraisal report, which is based on a multitude of factors. And then I compare my initial assessment with my final assessment. I have never been wrong.

The perceptive human mind can beat any Lie detection machine or any Narco analysis, to exhume the truth. I will talk about these two methods in greater detail later.

Back to Big Boss --

As soon as I saw Sampat Pal Devi, the leader of the Gulabi gang , I was interested. here was a woman who was heading a 20,000 strong gang of woman vigilantes, with heavy sticks to thrash the men folk. Was she for real?  Has she breached trust and taken all for a royal ride?

By the way every act of infidelity ( unless it is rape ) is 50:50, unless you are fu#kin' stupid. Both men and women are equal partners.  The man cannot penetrate unless the woman opens out her legs. If she does NOT open out, it goes into a different IPC section and becomes rape, which is severely punishable by law.

Why is it that man is always the culprit, when there is an act of sex which is NOT rape --say an extra marital affair ?  You ask handsome men, and they will tell you what sort of dirty mental games a woman is capable of.

What is more painful, a slap on a woman's face or DRIP DRIP  mental bleeding inflicted on man by a woman? The slap was more painful ?

Then this liberator woman must answer this question too. 

IS THERE ANY ANIMAL OR BIRD OR MAMMAL ( INSECTS PLEASE EXCUSE ) WHERE THE FEMALE GENDER IS MORE BEAUTIFUL, STRONGER OR INTELLIGENT THAN THE MALE GENDER?

The cook , the tailor? -- BLAH BLAH.

Oh Yeah?

If so, why is it that a master tailor or a master chef  is always a man? Pray? Prithee?

Now back to our Madame Sampat -who is as attractive as last night's dinner left overs.

 

The Gulabi gang (from Hindi gulabi, "pink") wears pink . 

She has been invited to international forums and has travelled to the US, France, Sweden and Italy.  

Why not?  

One day with an SMS the foreign forces can start off a riot and bring down a popularly elected Indian Government .  It is always better to invest in such mindless vigilante forces, right?-- and make India -- a Tunisia or an Egypt or a Libya or a Syria or an Iran?

Gulabis visit abusive husbands and beat them up with heavy sticks. 

In 2008, they stormed an electricity office in Banda district and beat up government officials , to turn back the power they had cut , as payments were overdue—as per the law. And all go GA GA.

After two days, I told my wife. This woman is a fake. She is a liar of the first order.  This Bigg Boss session will be her undoing --as the whole country is watching.

She keeps singing her own praises, and creates several occasions throughout the day for this.  How she caught a passport official by his collar BLAH BLAH.

After sometime this type of boast from a weasel faced woman, can get on your nerves unless you are a REAL hero or Champion like Mohammed Ali or Usain Bolt, in which case it can be a source of great joy to lesser mortals.

And sure enough -- 2 days ago, she proved to be a shameless liar of the first order. She was called into the confession room, and she apologized profusely for her trespasses  Then she comes out and tells everybody that Bigg Boss apologized to her.  She was exposed by the telephone caller at the end of the week meeting, and she was arm twisted into admitted to the house mates that she told a BIG LIE-- about the apology. 

Beware of false gods like this. They will take you to the cleaners. This is why I am writing this post.

Digression: There is a woman inside by the name of Sapna-- it is NOT right to put her into Bigg Boss 6 house without putting her through a psychological test.  WARNING-- I am serious about this.

And to this weird woman Sapna I will tell this:  
SHOVE YOUR KRANTI !! 
WE DON'T NEED IT IN INDIA-- WE LIKE OUR INDIAN WOMEN AS THEY ARE.
Do we need to see this freak Sapna on national TV? Is she the role model for our young Indian girls?

How do you catch a liar?

Well , every creature on this planet has a behavior pattern. When this pattern matching goes haywire, then you must suspect.

Let me give a simple example  A cat's DNA is programmed to dig a hole in the soil before a crap. Then after the solemn and private deed, with no prying eyes, the cat will cover the crap filled hole, with great care--taking her own time in order to be very efficient .

Even if a cat stays in a building, she will surely do this. If she does NOT do this , something is amiss. And then your antenna must be tuned--why not?

Check out the video below-- how the cat goes through them motions.

To solve a situation , you have to know the inherent behavior of the subjects involved.

Now let me talk about ze rat.

I will narrate a true incident which happened 32 years ago, when I was a Chief Officer  on a hectic tanker. The engineers had their own duty mess where they used to eat in their greasy boiler suits at odd hours. Well – Mickey mouse made a house there.

Actually it was a huge vicious looking and fearless bandicoot who would charge at you if you tried to corner him.  The Captain had a mini- crisis as the engineers refused to eat there till they saw the dead body of Mickey.  I really wonder if women fear rats more than HE men. 

Now Mickey was too large to enter a rat trap and sort of immune to the rat poison, we had on board .  So we held a meeting after a Abandon ship drill , and Captain , who was a big fan of my perception, put me in charge of a brainstorming session. We had the entire crew list of nearly 55 crew assembled on the bridge . 

All and sundry gave their suggestions, and I rejected them all.  The second engineers steward ( who was plain loco ) also gave his two pennies worth which made every body burst into derisive laughter. Actually this man was a big liability—but since he had a past track record of good service and a huge family for whom he was the sole bread winner, he was tolerated .

Now what was his suggestion?  He said--- take two buckets one red , one blue ( which made me wonder if the bandicoot had color vision ) half fill the red one with soap water— in the blue one put a piece of salted dried fish.

That was all—he looked confused and all were in splits , some even fell on the the floor among tears of pure unadulterated pleasure.

Before I terminated the brainstorming session I sort of made a judgement remark ( now –you MUST NOT deliver judgement or evaluate during or after a brainstorming session –as a matter of law ) . “ I am sure to find a drowned rat in the red bucket tomorrow morning “ . 

The sailors whose ideas I rejected were a bit pissed off.  They  asked me , how can you be so sure.  I relied “ I know rat behavior. To find a rat , if you don’t know his home, you have to find where the guy shat during the past week “ . 

That night I set up the buckets myself and locked and sealed the duty mess door.  Full night I could not sleep out of curiosity.  Finally after tossing and turning till 5 am I went to the duty mess with the Chief engineer and the master key–and sure enough the huge drowned bandicoot was floating in the red bucket. 

Chief Engineer kept repeating " This is unbelievable" . I guess the scenario unfolded as follows. 

Mickey smells the dried fish ( it is the best rat bait, ahead of cheese ) comes out to investigate – the smell is powerful enough to home into the blue bucket . Mickey jumps right in, eats ze fish, and gets his olfactory senses briefly overpowered.

Suddenly he remembers one more bucket holding a possible juicy treat. He dives right into the red bucket half filled with soap water and gets drowned.

Sherlock fu#kin’ Holmes—shut up!  Don’t ever think , you know it all.

Criminal investigation is all about picking up a lead- and then following it with determination to the logical end.  It always succeeds.

Let me tell you about a true incident which happened on my ship at Kingston anchorage, Jamaica. We were to go to dry dock and the paint store was full of ship side paint-- a fortune, as the orange ( 99.99% Sulphuric acid resistant ) paint is very expensive.

At 0630, My Jamaican Third Mate knocks on my door and tells me that the paint store is empty, and the lock is broken. This now meant our dry docking would be delayed and all commercial plans would go PHUT!.  And Capt Vadakayil would smell of s#it.

So I called up the agents and told them to come on my ship immediately, with the local police. Meanwhile I found that one of the drums was leaking slightly as there were drips on Orange paint till the area on the main deck where they lowered it into a boat .

As soon as the agent and the police came, I told them to take me to all the small boat berths in that area, starting off with the furthest and the least busiest, at that hour.  As we approached the first berth itself, I could see by binoculars a huge black guy sitting at the water edge and despondently trying to scrape off orange marks from his body. It will NOT come off unless you apply a specific thinner stripper.

Anyway we bush whacked him, and got him to confess , where the paints have been taken by a lorry. The paints were back on board within two hours.

Later the Third mate tells me " As soon as you left , the Jamaican crew were commenting,  that our Indian Captain has the brains to get all the paint back. And they were laying out wagers . Because all were terribly afraid of a brutal Jamaican police inquiry , which could mean losing their jobs , as an 'inside job' " . 

To be frank, I felt good.

The human mind has inherent weaknesses. It can be raped at will by people who know how to do it.

A quarter century ago, I had walked into a captains cabin to take over command of the ship.  The outgoing master was in animated conference with the bosun and the ships laundryman.  From the laundryman’s “ I don’t give a damn “ , body language I could see that he that he was on the warpath.

Both sailors were sent away and we settled down to the formal process of handing / taking over command. I could see that the outgoing captain could not harness his mind to the job—his mind was chattering . So I asked him, what transpired with the laundryman.

To cut a long story short, the laundryman had refused to do a particular job. He was right, and he had a point. For he was employed to wash stewards uniforms ( white tunics and pants ) – not civilian clothes. At the same time the stewards had a point, as they had won civilian clothes on duty due to water rationing at a long anchorage.

I told the captain “ you just call him back and I will make him agree to what he refused to do , just a few minutes ago— even if he was sacked or his knee caps were broken”.

I then took a A4 size paper and wrote down 10 questions , whose answers required the answer YES.  The last and 10th question would be “ are you willing to wash the clothes , you refused to wash” .

The captain was clean bowled.

Here was a guy telling that he could do the impossible. He wanted to see the questionnaire , and I gave it to him. All I wanted him to do was sit in the bedroom behind the curtains and hear the proceedings—to check if I followed the script.

So pretty soon the bosun and laundryman were called back.

I shot off the first question, after introducing myself as the new captain.

1)Are you the laundryman ?—YEEEAH!

2)Is you name Mr so and so? – YES

3)You have come to the ship to earn money for your family?—YES

4)You have refused to wash the stewards civilian clothes?—YES ( he started to give an explanation –I stopped him by raising my hand )

5)These civilian clothes were worn during water rationing –YES

6th to 9th is classified- XXXX

10th question:) SO WILL YOU WASH THE CLOTHES NOW , SO THAT I DON’T HAVE TO SEND YOU HOME –  “YES SIR!”

The average human mind is not programmed or intelligent enough  to open its doors wide and then suddenly slam shut.

  

If you can indeed slam it shut and give NO answer after 9 consecutive YES answers –then you are a super genius—like the legendary James Bond.

By the way if you put 3 of the best geniuses in the world along with 007 in the 4 corners of a room, tell them that there will be an explosion within 30 seconds—and they MUST find a way out of the room—we all know who will escape in a jiffy.

A liar can always be squeezed out of his comfort zone, where he starts giving the usual signs exhibited by a liar.

Let me give an example, which happened 3 decades ago-- on a container Cadet ship with 18 young cadets.

I was sleeping , we had sailed out of port. My wife woke me up and said a grim faced Chief Officer is standing at the door with the CC ( Cadet Captain ).

Thinking that this will be an emergency, I quickly wore my robe and called them into my day room.

It so transpired that the Cadet Captains music set was missing from his cabin. He had spent 3 months of wages to but that nice Sony set, and was distraught.

So I told Chief Officer to muster all the Cadets on the bridge at 0900 hrs, after breakfast . He was to break this news  just before breakfast. And then he had to keep vigilance using the First Officer as to which all cadets were having closed door meetings.

So pretty soon, Chief Officer rang me up and said all the Cadets are now on the bridge. I called him down and told him to make them stand in alphabetical order from left to right in a single line, in full uniform with peak cap . And he would have to watch their hands from behind. The hands in front I would watch.

Prettyy soon I went up on the bridge , in my dark Ray Ban shades , announced that this session is to catch the cadet who has thrown the music set of the Cadet leader overboard.  First I got all of them to say individually that they had nothing to do with it.

And then for the next 3 minutes I just stood in front of them, with my head not moving at all-- but my eyes scanning for the usual tell tale signs.

Suddenly I said " Cadet XXX fall out.  Pack your bags.  Your wages stop now.  You shall remain confined within your cabin, till the next port.  Your food will be served in your cabin.  All dismissed!".  

Then I went down to my cabin.

Chief Officer followed me to my cabin and said " That cadet whom you chose, does NOT get along with the Cadet Captain, and the OOW on the bridge was witness to a dispute between them while lashing containers prior departure port . His hands were behind his back tightly clenched while he stood in line "

Then he walked out and came back inside immediately. " The cadet is waiting outside in tears"

He came in and confessed and requested me fervently NOT to ruin his sea career.  And he promised to buy a new set to replace the one he threw overboard. 

So that matter died there, and I told Chief officer to let this confession , remain a secret.  Repentance is a good thing. You dont destroy a young budding career,  based on ONE single bad incident.

Now let me get to the nitty gritty of body language and fake behavior.

A guilty person gets defensive. An innocent person will often go on the offensive. 

This is why I told my wife about the Aarushi Talwar case, as soon as the incident happened.  A woman whose 14 year old daughter has been raped and murdered in cold blood is bound to be hysterical. 

You normally expect a parent whose child is missing ( not killed ) to be hysterical, begging for the police to get out there and find their baby.  If a parent seems detached and aloof, something is fishy , right?   

Punch into Google search THE RAPE OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND- VADAKAYIL.

So what are the usual tell tale signs of a liar?

When words and body language are in conflict, ignore 'em words. And secret-- when women lie they always appear to be damn busy.

The liar always takes up less body space. He will avoid making eye contact.

If it is a cold day with less humidity he will touch his nose to dissipate the static build up caused by the blood rushing within the mobius coil inside his rib cage.  Bill Clinton touched his nose 88 times , during his Monika Lewisnky hearing.

Any display of emotion is delayed, stays longer it would naturally, then suddenly ceases.

The timing between face gestures and words gets out of sync.  Expressions are strictly limited to mouth movements when someone is faking emotions.

A liar is always uncomfortable facing his accuser.  A liar will use your words to make a answer to your question.  When asked, “Did you throw the music set overboard ?” The liar answers, “No, I did not throw the music set overboard”. 

The guilty person may speak more than natural, adding unnecessary filling details to convince you... for they are not comfortable with silence or pauses in the conversation. 

The guilty wants the subject changed; an innocent person may be confused by the sudden change in topics and will want to back to the previous subject.  

If you asked someone to "What was the ship side color of your previous ship"—he would look up to his right ( for a RH man ) to recollect a true image . If he was to lie and fake it he would look up to his left, for visually constructing an image.

A liar uses humor or sarcasm to avoid a subject .  A change in the pitch of a person's tone, or a lot of stammering, or throat clearing could indicate a lie.  He may  becoming pale and blink more.

A liar contradicts himself, when you ask him the same question after a while. He will use emotional blackmail and make you believe that he is a trampled upon underdog, in a soap opera.  Your tendency then would be to take his side. A liar would manipulate and say everything to make you dance to his tune.

He will creates smokescreens, or even coercion  by raising his voice.  A liar tends to breathe faster, displaying a series of short breaths followed by one deep breath. The mouth may appear dry, causing hajaar throat clearing.

People tend to sweat more when they lie. A honest answer comes quickly from memory. Lies require a quick mental review of what they have told others to avoid inconsistency and to make up new details as needed. 

Ask the person to tell the story backwards. This is very hard to do, especially when requiring no loss of the details. Even a professional spy can find this reversal of approach a hard one to tackle effectively.

You may hear the phrase ‘to be honest’ more often than not.  

When someone is comfortable with you while answering your questions, he will move to comfortable positions, eg. tilting their head to one side or the other.  When suddenly asked a question that they are forced to lie about, he will straighten or stiffen up, no longer tilting their head.. 

You can always pick them out when they do something they don’t normally do.  Women covering the neck dimple , this is about centering themselves.

When people lie, they tend to keep their body very still. There will be lack of emphasis. When we speak, we naturally give emphasis both verbally and non-verbally to what we say. Hand gestures, inflections, and head movements accentuate our words.  

When our unconscious brain ( right hand brain lobe ) doesn’t back up what we’re saying, those emphasizing gestures will not be present.  An innocent person accused of murder will probably pound their fist and yell, “I didn’t do it!” You probably won’t see that with a person who actually committed the crime .

Liars tend to place their hands very firmly on the chair rest as if they are holding on to these objects to save their lives.  This is essentially a way of de-stressing the body that is reacting to the growing anxiety within them.

Lying need not be outright. It can assume various shady avatars. They can omit relevant information, which poses less risk, as it does not  involve inventing any cock and bull stories. It is passive deception and less guilt is involved. Or they can be in denial by just refusing to acknowledge a truth.  

Or they could minimize, by reducing the effects of a mistake, a fault, or a judgment call. Or it could be exaggeration, falsely representing as greater, better, more experienced, more successful.  Or it could be lying by exclusion, by which he tells the truth but deliberately leaves out certain critical details--like Bill Clinton of Monika Lewsinsky fame, 

Or it could be a misleading lie , where in he does not tell an out-and-out lie, but still has the deceptive purpose of making someone believe in a falsehood. A good example of such a lie would be a car driver  who accidentally scratches your car, but he says  "the neighbour's kids were playing by the car."  The neighbour's kids, in truth, were playing by the car but they were not the cause of the scratches on the car.

For example, if a teenager goes to his first class and then skips the rest of his school day. When asked by his parent "Did you skip school today?" The teenager can plainly say "I was at school today," without actually lying, since he was at school, while omitting the fact that he was not at school for the entire day. 

There will be a lack of assertiveness. His tone of voice will be lower and he will appear to be less confident. He will speak as he has to make up events as he talks. This usually results in slower talking speed or in stopping many times while talking in order to find what to say.

Picking Imaginary lint, crossing arms across chest, putting hands in pocket are all signs of lying or it could be disagreement . 

Some liars sometimes avoid "lying" by not making direct statements. They imply answers instead of denying something directly.

Finally you have to use your perception and listen to your gut and intuition.  If you are not sure, don't jump to conclusions.

Intuitive decisions are NOT guesswork . Intuition is a sudden and inexplicable knowing. The divining power of intuition comes from our inner self. It arises from very rapid processing of bits of information that are stored in our subconscious. 

Intuition thinks in terms of metaphor, feelings, pictures, and the spatial whole and doesn't fit neatly into the cause-and-effect model. Intuition is a ability to cut through the thickness of surface reality . Your sub-conscious which operates a dozen times faster than your conscious mind has picked up on signals that your conscious mind has not yet processed. 

We function through partial information, and intuition gives us an overview, a whole sense of things Intuition is fast, based on pattern matching. Intuition gone wild becomes “jumping to conclusions” 

So what exactly is intuition? It is the messages from your unconscious mind making contact with your consciousness. . 

Gut feeling is the uncanny ability to detect patterns in the world around us, and to extrapolate larger truths .

The Pope in the Middle Ages approved using boiling water to detect liars as it was believed honest men would withstand it better than liars.

The polygraph was invented in 1921 by John Augustus Larson, a medical student at the University of California at Berkeley . Lie detectors are NOT admissible in court, because they are not perfect. One of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history passed the polygraph and killed again. Refusal to submit to a polygraph is generally not admissible in court, and polygraphs themselves are always inadmissible.

The polygraph pens don't do a special dance when a person lies. The polygrapher scores the test by comparing physiological responses (breathing, blood pressure, heart, and perspiration rates) to a calibrated base. If no difference is found between relevant and control questions, the test result is considered "inconclusive."

You can defeat a polygraph by sneaking a tack in your shoe or puckering your a$$hole sphincter muscles. When the interviewer asks you a control question, like "Is your name Mr Bumpkin " sharply press on the tack with your toe. The pain response will throw off all the sensors looking for changes in heartbeat and breath. The only way you can tell if he's lying is to wait for him to screw up. Liars always do.

On May 5, 2010, The Supreme Court of India declared use of narcoanalysis, brain mapping and polygraph tests on suspects as illegal and against the constitution. Article 20(3) of the Indian Constitution-"No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself." Polygraph tests are still legal if the defendant requests one.

You could tickle the upper palate using the tip of your tongue when you give a honest answer to screw the polygraph machine. Or you could do mental arithmetic, thinking exciting sexual orgy thoughts, altering your breathing pattern, or simply biting the side of the tongue. Develop a breathing strategy. Solve a quadratic equation in your head during control questions.

Modern polygraphs will also record things like arm and leg movement. They will also have soft seats to checkmate you from puckering your a$$hole. They could make you remove your shoes and throw the tack out.  Skin conductivity (called the galvanic skin or electrodermal response) is measured through electrodes attached to a subject's fingertips.

The job of polygraphers is to extract confessions, and in one way, the whole examination is a complex ruse to trick you into confessing something.  The polygrapher will most likely try to convince you that he she can “see” a lie in your polygraph, even if there’s nothing abnormal there. Don’t fall for this bait.

If your polygraph is part of a criminal investigation, you have a right to refuse , and you should refuse, even if you are innocent, because of the possibilities of a “false positive.” 

If I had my way, I would ban every lawyer from becoming a Minister.  Most of the criminals have good qualities like “namak halal “ ( gratitude ) and being “wajan ka pakka” ( honour a promise ).   How many of you feel that lawyers are NOT ungrateful,  pathological liars?

What is a WHITE LIE?   It is a lie told, to protect others. You see, the white men have made sure everything white is good and everything black is bad.  So you can wear a white coat and walk in anywhere. Nobody will stop you. 

Even laughing at a joke which is NOT funny, just to please somebody is a lie.  Thanking a person when there is nothing to thank him for is a lie. 

Dom Arigato Gozaimasu.

So are you a liar?

Here is a 7000 year old Vedic chant--Grace and peace!

CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

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