How to act like a detective

How many of you had aspired to be detectives during your childhood? I am sure many of you must have harboured secret ambitions of being a detective or spy at some point of time or the other. It is human nature to have an affinity towards anything mysterious or curious and we do have this tendency to think of ourselves as troubleshooter or saviour of the world, well if the trouble seems manageable enough to be shot at that is.

Add to it our hyper-imagination fed by the crime and detective novels that we start lapping it up from our young age, we no sooner start identifying ourselves as the Famous Five or Nancy Drew and Hardy boys. By the time you are of the age of Sherlock Holmes or Poirot, your dreams have been swept aside under some rug.

How about you revisit your childhood and dedicate a day to playing ‘Detective – Detective’ along with your friends or just trying it out at your own home or colony and see the wild fun that follows? Here are some easy tricks for you to try out and make your family and friends go completely crazy with your spy like antics.

Fingerprint tracing

Finger print tracing and then collecting them sounds quite technical but with a few household objects you can easily do that with minimal expertise. All you need is a little bit of cornflour, camel hair brush, transparent duct tape and construction paper.

On the suspected surface just brush lightly with the camel hairbrush after dusting with the cornflour. You will see patterns of finger prints after that. Now just carefully apply the duct tape over it and pull it off delicately. (this is applicable only in hard surfaces. For the smooth surfaces you will need the experts) and stick them on a construction paper. There, you have your fingerprints now

Tracking if some has been in your place

No, asking the neighbor will not be a good idea for he/she might not know or tell! A very simple way is to leave a small piece of paper wedged in between the hinges of the door or of your desk drawers. If it is in place then your room is clean. Nobody has messed with it. If it isn’t there then you know somebody has been going around your things. Spouse? Parents? children? Just beware!

Invisible ink

If you want to send a secret message to someone then a good idea will be to SMS but if you want to romanticize your secret message then how about writing it with invisible ink. Trick or treat, whatever be the reason for your invisible message , you can prepare your own invisible ink by squeezing a lemon or orange and dipping a cotton tipped stick in the juice and writing it down with it on a paper. The moment it dries the writing disappears and will appear only if you hold it against a hot bulb or over a flame.

Unlocking a locked door

No this is not a Houdini trick rather it is a trick by chance. Many a time people forget taking off the key from the lock after shutting the door behind them. If that is the case and you are on the other side of the door then just pass a large newspaper underneath the door with a corner sticking at your end to be pulled out. Now insert a pointy object into the key hole and push the key out. It will fall on the paper and you can easily pull it out along with paper and walk away to freedom if you had been locked in. But jokes apart take care that you don’t leave the key behind when you lock doors. It is a dangerous thing to do.

Signals

You can send visual SOS signals if in distress with a torch light or a mirror. The SOS signal is three dits three dahs and three dits. But any visual signal repeated thrice is a distress signal. Speaking of mirror, it is a great device to track if anyone is shadowing you by feigning to have a touch up if you are a female!

Do you want to eavesdrop on whats going on behind you?

Well we do have many gadgets this days for spying from nanny-cams to spycams. But if you are someone with limited resources then you can eavesdrop using just two phones one being a mobile phone with some features. Just set the phone on silent non vibrating mode. Then set it on auto answer and hide it someplace where it isn’t seen but within the voice range.  Now you can easily sneak on in the conversation that place in the room.

Well those amateur tips were shared with you just for some wholesome fun and to reminisce those childhood fancies. There is nothing seriously academic in them and please leave certain things to the experts only. If you are just an aware and alert citizen ready to act as a responsible countrymen, then that is more than enough and if done sincerely and patriotically will earn the respects of even the most able of RAW agents.

Info credits to ALL the Enid blyton books that we used to read while we were young and www.spybee.com

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