The monk in the picture is not Netaji

Good heavens! Is it a ghostly apparition or what? What was a man long dead doing by the side of his recently deceased friend?!

No other snippet of the Netaji mystery has traversed generational gaps like this one. They say that for old time's sake Subhas Bose had turned up to pay respects to Jawaharlal Nehru's body in New Delhi's Teen Murti Bhavan in May 1964. Well, about time Mission Netaji swiftly busted the long-standing myth that provoked critics to bracket the disbelievers in the Taipei plane crash theory with the crackpots who encountered Elvis Presley, the late King of the Rock.

The monk seen in the above image, taken from a movie reel, could not be Bose for he was Vira Dhammavara -- a venerable Cambodian Buddhist monk who lived in south Delhi for decades before passing away in the US only a couple of years back at the grand old age of 110. Dhammavara's inadvertent doppelganger act lasted barely for a second on camera, but it triggered a sensation so strong that it caused commotion in India for several years. How did the monk take it? Disciples say he was much amused.

Likeness aside, Dhammavara was short statured unlike Netaji, who, in case you did not know, was almost 5' 10".

Take a closer look ...