When I picked up former Mumbai police commissioner and ex-DG of Maharashtra D. Sivanandhan's book ``The Brahmastra Unleashed", I expected a memoir about policing and crime control, stories of raids, encounters, and narrow escapes that dominate most accounts from India’s law enforcement corridors. What I found instead was a deeply layered reflection on courage, law, and the psychological endurance it takes to stand up to fear when fear becomes a city’s language. Written by Sivanandhan, one of Maharashtra’s most respected police officers and a man who witnessed the worst of Mumbai’s underworld years, this book is both a chronicle of history and a case study in human resilience.

As a psychologist, what fascinated me most about Sivanandhan’s writing was not just the operations he led, but the way he frames the inner world of policing , the strain of leadership, the balance between aggression and empathy, and the constant tension between justice and legality. The book’s title itself, ‘The Brahmastra Unleashed’ suggests both destruction and discipline. The ‘Brahmastra,’ in mythology, is a divine weapon that can annihilate evil but must be used with wisdom. In Sivanandhan’s narrative, this metaphor becomes psychological: the true weapon against crime is not brute force, but the intelligent,........

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