THE REVIEW OF SCAM 1992
The Hansal Mehta directed series (Jai Mehta gets aco-direction credit) does a smart balancing act, noway relatively tilting over into Harshad Mehta adulation, nor showing him as an unmitigated villain. Thousands of people lost all their plutocrat. Numerous came void. Some prominent citizens lost their lives, and reports. And Mehta came the most wanted man in India.
Fiddle 1992 The Harshad Mehta Story is a fascinating account of a man who started small, and within an incredibly short period, amassed the kind of stunning fortune utmost people only dream of. The web series, which lasts an extensive ten occurrences, isn't just a detailed sketch of Mehta and his distinctly dodgy ways and his close cohorts, it’s also a portrayal of an India which was on the verge of momentous change. Liberalisation was sweeping down the strangleholds of the license raj. Change was coming, but there were gaps between the creaky old ways of doing effects, and the new ways Mehta plant those gaps, dug deep into them, and turned the system outside out.
The series is grounded on the book The Fiddle Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Down by fiscal intelligencers Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu. It opens with Dalal, played by Shreya Dhanwanthary, getting a tip from a harried SBI functionary about a‘ghotala’ involving Rs 500 crore. Both the hugeness of the sum, and the shuddering anxiety on the man’s (Sharib Hashmi) face sets Dalal and her mate Basu on the trail of the story which blew the lid off the biggest fiddle of the time, unravelling the unholy nexus between banks, both Indian and foreign, fiscal institutions, elderly functionaries in the government, and important godmen. Was it Chandraswami, the saffron- sheathe transport and shaker who could shake governments at the time? The diurnal does n’t name him, but it looks veritably much like him.
My eyes oat over when they hear the word‘the request’, but I've to say that Fiddle 1992 hooked me, kept me that way throughout, indeed though some corridor felt a trifle stretched and loose. The jotting is atrocious, and there-creation of that period and its people authentic. The Mehtas aren't Gujaratis who speak as if they're in a kitchen- Gomorrah Television diurnal; Harshad and his family, their women, and their mama feel like a traditional common- family who ’ve noway forgotten their roots indeed when they move from their modest suburban Kandivili dwelling to their candescent extension in Worli, with a swimming pool on the sundeck that looks out to the Arabian ocean, and a line of luxury buses in the parking lot. Also spot on are the corridor when Mehta is learning the ropes of the request under the education of a fellow jobber (Chirag Vohra; awful), who goes on to come an integral part of the establishment Mehta sets up, along with his bases-on-the- ground- family (Hemant Kher).
The series is grounded on the book The Fiddle Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Down by fiscal intelligencers Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu. It opens with Dalal, played by Shreya Dhanwanthary, getting a tip from a harried SBI functionary about a‘ghotala’ involving Rs 500 crore. Both the hugeness of the sum, and the shuddering anxiety on the man’s (Sharib Hashmi) face sets Dalal and her mate Basu on the trail of the story which blew the lid off the biggest fiddle of the time, unravelling the unholy nexus between banks, both Indian and foreign, fiscal institutions, elderly functionaries in the government, and important godmen. Was it Chandraswami, the saffron- sheathe transport and shaker who could shake governments at the time? The diurnal does n’t name him, but it looks veritably much like him.
The only place where it does n’t feel relatively as lived-in, is when it moves into the review office and the area of news- gathering ever that’s a set, as it nearly always is in a mugged interpretation, in the way the stock- exchange noway is. We get, for illustration, that Dalal is an superheated intelligencer, fully convinced about the veracity of her story, but would she have responded relatively as abrasively to an editor? (The bits featuring the fabulous R Laxman wandering about the Times structure are a delight, however). You would n’t indeed have noticed these veritably minor effects in any other series, precisely because they're so minor, but they show up in discrepancy only because the rest of it's so spot on.
Dhanwanthary is credible. As is Faisal Rashid, playing Basu. And that’s quite a feat, given that intelligencers are the hardest people to pull off, credibly, on screen. Between the two of them, they bring alive the dogged, putting-the- pieces- together, double-and-triadic-checking-with- sources stylish practices of the stylish investigative journalists. A elderly editor I spoke to, to clarify a many effects about the fiddle, recalls the excitement of the time when Dalal and Basu were routinely breaking stories, as they tracked Mehta’s trails through the innards of the system the series gives us a sense of the nonstop, hard work that goes into a story like this. On a particular note too, the two make a fascinating brace, bickering and laughing as they're shown working together nearly, both professionally and tête-à-tête
The series starts in the 80s, and takes us till 2000, and we see Gandhi growing aged, his face lined, his hair slate. But his station noway changes he's the‘Amitabh Bachchan’of the stock request, and as he likes to say,‘Harshad ka raj ma, toh request majaa mama’. Bachchan’s name crops up at frequent intervals, easily drawing our attention to the fact that if one were a screen superhero, the other was the idol of the common man. Indeed after Mehta was rolled, and his shenanigans started tumbling out, there were an amazing number of regular people who refused to condemn him. As far as they were concerned, he was n’t a pincher. All he did, they believed fervently, was to divert other people’s finances into schemes which made him unimaginably fat, with some of it trickling to ordinary people who were dipping their toes into‘the request’ (in the late 80s and 90s, it was a much lower, conditional reality, not the mammoth it has turned into in the last decade or so). With high ministers and other advanced-ups allegedly had their hand in the till (the Bofors reproach broke in the late 80s, and its smash was still resonating), the moral compass of a nation had shifted; the only thing Mehta did wrong, in the view of this section, was that he got caught.
The Hansal Mehta directed series (Jai Mehta gets aco-direction credit) does a smart balancing act, noway relatively tilting over into Harshad adulation, nor showing him as an unmitigated villain. What we get is a full-bodied, completely dilate-out, complex existent, so much a man of his time and place and circumstance and chops, and just for that this series is a winner.
Still, people who were covering the Harshad Mehta story at the time will stop short of calling him a crook (which he plainly was what differently do you call someone who bends all the rules, and does easily illegal stuff to line his own resources?), If you ask them straight-up. What they will say is that he was a smart man who did what he could to fulfil his dreams, while managing to move himself and the bendy men who should have known better, as well as those who had their eye on the main chance, that what he was doing was n’t exactly wrong, it was just taking advantage of the loopholes of the system, which anyway demanded an overhaul.
A prestigious business magazine cover at the height of Mehta’s putatively impregnable run of the request, called him‘The Raging Bull’. The coexisting story sounded as dazed by him as was the general‘junta’. What everyone forgot that a rise always comes before a potent fall. And eventually, that’s what it was, a exemplary tale rapacity isn't always good.