ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

The Rediff Special/ M D Riti

A Tae Kwon Do teacher and his vanishing trick

Why would three intelligent young people, studying and working in excellent institutions, suddenly disappear from home with their martial arts teacher? This is the question that three worried parents of ISRO in Bangalore are trying to figure out.

On April 15, Gayatri Ramnath, 18, Vinanthi Pathak, 17 and her brother Adesh Pathak, 22, left home. Their parents are certain they have gone with their Tae Kwon Do instructor Daniel George, 28, who also vanished at the same time. "We are quite sure they have gone with him," says Gayatri's father K R Ramnath, a retired ISRO officer, and adds, "He had practically mesmerised them, and they would never listen to a word against him. The kind of hero worship they had for this man is unimaginable."

Ramnath describes the man they know as George as being north Indian, despite his Keralite or Tamil sounding name. He says he used to speak English and Hindi very fluently. A poster issued by the local police, describing George as a 'wanted' man, says that he 'is strongly built and has a wheatish complexion.' Anyone who spots him anywhere has been requested to either contact Gayatri's father K R Ramnath, whose address is No: 653, 6th Main, 16th Cross, ISRO Layout, Bangalore 560078 or call Deputy Commissioner of Police H N S Rao, who is handling this missing persons complaint, at his office: telephone number (080) 6635199. The missing young people's friends have also set up an e-mail address for all communication in this regard: missingfriends@hotmail.com.

The parents appear to be sure that there is no romantic involvement between the missing students and George. All three are known to be bright, intelligent, athletic young people with a great zest for living. Gayatri is a professional college student, Vinanthi is doing her Pre University at a Bangalore college and Adesh works for a local firm.

Ramnath describes Gayatri as a bold, adventurous, fun-loving tomboy who was least interested in make-up or glamorous clothes. She actually wanted to join the army, or take up a career in flying, and then opted for professional college instead. "My daughter wanted to achieve the pinnacle in anything she did," says her distraught father. "In fact, the results of her last tests, which we got after she disappeared, also show excellent grades. When she joined a meditation programme a year ago, she went into it so deeply that we had to stop her after a while. After she started training in Tae Kwon Do, she changed her food habits, did 100 baithaks and jogged for miles every morning with the sole objective of mastering this art," he revealed.

When Gayatri left home on the morning of April 15, all she carried with her was a lunch box packed by her mother, bus fare of Rs 10 as the TVS Scooty she used to drive around on was withdrawn by her parents, and a spare set of clothes to change into for martial arts practice after college. She never returned in the evening, and nobody knows where she has gone.

"We all think they have gone with their master, expecting to take part in some important Tae Kwon Do tournament or demonstration programme," says Rahul, an ex-classmate and close friend of Gayatri, who was not a part of the martial arts group. He has set up a website on the missing friends and handles its e-mail correspondence.

George came into the lives of these three young people as recently as December, when the residents of that ISRO colony hired him to run classes for their offspring. Before that, they had another older martial arts teacher whom all the parents describe as a "saintly man," who taught them right until the time he fell ill and died.

Ramnath and his neighbours came across George when they saw him practising at the World Tae Kwon Do federation in Bangalore. They assumed he was working for the federation or was training under its Korean masters Kim and Lee, and since Tae Kwon Do is a martial art recognised by the Government of India, they decided to try Daniel out as a teacher for their children. "He called himself a fourth Dan, and was certainly very good at his craft," says Ramnath, who has been chosen by the group of parents as their spokesperson. "He never misbehaved with the children at any time, and we have no reason to suspect sexual abuse or misconduct on his part even now."

The parents found out that he was teaching at the Canadian Indian School, a posh school with a large number of foreign students, and decided that that was a good enough reference. Repeated requests for a biodata and residential address were never granted. Instead, George told them sob stories about how he was the son of a famous doctor, and had run away from home as a child because of parental oppression.

He had a brother in the army and was himself an MA from a leading college in Delhi. He also brought a young woman called Kathy, a little girl called Angel and an infant, introducing them as his family. He got the job and began teaching his craft to about 18 students, a dozen of them junior and the rest in the age group of the missing youngsters, on the campus of a local school on weekends.

Gradually, the classes increased in frequency and the children began practising every evening. Meanwhile, George shifted the venue of his classes to the home of Vinanthi and Adesh Pathak, as the Pathak siblings had lost their mother and had only a kind-hearted grandmother at home all day, their father being out at ISRO. Gradually, the parents began noticing several odd things about George. He used to charge a fee of just Rs 100 a month per student, and said his only other occupation was teaching at the Canadian school. But he travelled around in a Tata Sumo and used a cellphone.

"He used to hang around the locality the whole day, and many of us began to wonder how he could afford his car and phone without working anywhere else," says Rahul. "We tried pointing this out to his students, but they would get very angry with any criticism of him."

Then, Daniel told the students that a cousin of his was coming to Bangalore to deliver her child, and asked them to help him organise this. Despite their parents' advice to steer clear of Daniel's problems, since he had a home and family, the students helped him with the delivery through the assistance of a parent who is a doctor. The woman called Alice delivered a female child on March 9.

At first, all the parents tried explaining their concerns to the children. For example, George used to reportedly boast to his students that he could copy anyone's handwriting or forge any signature. "But the kids would not hear a word against Daniel," says Ramnath. "Now, my daughter's friends tell me that unquestioning obedience was one of the first conditions that he laid down. They must obey the martial arts master implicitly, and do whatever he said, even if it involved lying to their parents. He became something like a cult figure for them."

At this point, some parents began placing restrictions on their children's movements. Ramnath, for example, told his daughter that she must reach home by 7 pm every evening, although she was studying in a professional college. Meanwhile, the children always said that George lived in a locality called R T Nagar, which is on the other side of the city. Once, after a demonstration somewhere in the city, he took the students to his home for lunch. However, none of them was able to recall the way to that house.

When the trio never returned home, their parents began investigating George's background and activities closely, and discovered a whole trail of dead ends. They tried the federation, where Kim and Lee said they had just seen Daniel around and he sometimes used to practise on their premises: they neither knew his address nor his whereabouts. However, Daniel had gone to meet them just before he vanished, and they had bought his Tata Sumo from him earlier. When Ramnath checked the car's documents, he found Kim's address in the insurance papers and a Himachal Pradesh address, which turned out to be bogus, in the RC book. The Canadian School said they had no forwarding address for George and knew nothing of what he did after his coaching hours with them.

Searching frantically through his memory for clues, Ramnath remembered that George had asked him to help a neighbour's son, who suffered from cerebral palsy, to get extra time to complete a board examination. Ramnath managed with a lot of difficulty to trace the father with just the single clue of his name and the huge public sector company he worked for.

He found out from him that Daniel had lived in Kodihalli, which is a suburb of Bangalore, and not in R T Nagar, which is a much more central locality. However, the ex-neighbour said George had vacated that house on April 5, 10 days before the three youngsters disappeared, saying he had been transferred by some company that he worked for to Calcutta, and had sold all his possessions except for a chocolate brown Maruti car with a Himachal Pradesh registration number, and moved to Ulsoor.

Next, Ramnath decided to try to find the woman called Alice. Another friend and fellow student, who might well have become a part of the missing group but for her telephone, which was out of order for a while, and the fact that she had tests, told Ramnath that she had had her child baptised at the St John's Church on April 4. Ramnath went there in an attempt to find any address or telephone number for George, but drew a blank again.

The child had been baptised and named Karen on April 4, but Ramnath could not trace either the person who conducted the baptism or a certain Radhakrishna Photo Studio, which had taken pictures of the ceremony. A check of the nursing home where Alice delivered her child only turned up the doctor's address as the child's address! An attempt to track George through his mobile telephone again drew a blank as he had sold it to someone. The contact address he had given to the buyer was that of Pathak!

Now quite desperate, Ramnath began doing the rounds of public telephone booths near George's old house. Here, he finally turned up an unexpected bonanza. A couple of operators remembered the man who used to drive very fast, and were able to dig up some outstation telephone numbers that he had called. Ramnath found that they were calls to Nepal, UP and even Dubai. He then approached the telephone department with one constantly called number and managed to trace the address of a man called Arvind Srivastava in Jhansi, who also appeared to be a fellow martial arts expert.

Ramnath then remembered that in response to a telephone call from George, the students had met him at the railway station on February 27, when he was supposed to have arrived from Jhansi. He has now compiled a dossier of all the information he could gather and has handed it over to the police, which is trying hard to track George down.

Meanwhile, when Ramnath was at the Kumaraswamy Layout police station a couple of days after his daughter vanished, three ladies arrived at the station and declared that they were looking for Gayatri Ramnath! When Ramnath introduced himself as Gayatri's father, the ladies said they were looking for Gayatri and Daniel, who had sold a Maruti car (registration number HP080055) to them. He had taken two advance payments of Rs 5,000 and Rs 30,000 from them, and left the car with them. Then, on April 14 morning, he had gone to the buyer's house, said that his child was ill and he needed the car to rush her to a doctor urgently. He would take the balance payment for the car after returning the vehicle to them.

That was the last they saw of George, the car or their advance payment! When they told Ramnath the dates on which they had met the duo, Ramnath realised at once that his daughter could not have possibly met them at that time as he could personally vouch for all her movements on those days. He took the ladies home to discuss the matter more thoroughly, and eventually showed them some family albums. To his surprise, they identified Vinanthi as Gayatri from the pictures!

"This case is now under investigation," says Deputy Commissioner of Police H N S Rao. "It is too early for us to say anything further." The police poster says: 'The accused (Daniel) is suspected to be a fraud. He is also wanted in many other cases'. But the Bangalore police are reluctant to discuss him any further just now. However, new facts about him are coming to light every day, most of them turned up by Ramnath's single-minded efforts.

The latest is that George might actually be quite bald, and that he wore a wig: neighbours now reveal that they had spotted him with a balding pate. Meanwhile, the Ramnaths, their schoolgoing son, Pathak and the young people's friends are waiting desperately, hoping that the missing trio will turn up with a perfectly commonplace explanation for their sudden absence. George was overheard telling some people that he planned to open a Tae Kwon Do academy in Nepal. Everyone hopes that Gayatri, Adesh and Vinanthi are just voluntarily helping him set that up, and that nothing worse than that has happened to them.

The Rediff Specials

Tell us what you think of this feature