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Showing posts from September, 2018

The Idol Thief by S. Vijay Kumar - Book Review

In this hardcover edition of Vijay Kumar's debut book, the reader is taken deep into the mysterious World of Art thievery. The nonfiction book could have very well been a thriller genre fiction about how a handful of volunteers team up to counter millions of dollars worth racket involving stolen art and artifacts.                            More significantly, here we are talking about idols of Gods and Goddesses stolen from temples located in Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India. A well-oiled network of thieves, art dealers, businessmen aided by a complacent and apathetic government, managed to loot Temples of their prized artifacts, especially those which are like centuries old. These were then exported abroad to be sold to fancy museums and art collectors. Yes, people like to buy Gods too! For their personal collection. What probably they failed into account was a group of proactive individuals, connected through the internet, unraveling this at times uninte