Updated: October 10, 2020 7:03:12 pm
Scam 1992: The Story of Harshad Mehta airs on SonyLIV.
Money is what makes the world go round, they say. It certainly made Harshad Shantilal Mehta work. Those who lived through the late 1980s and early 1990s will remember the meteoric rise and rise of the man who came to be known as El Gran Toro, so labeled because he started the bull run in the stock market in 1991, which ended in a massive crash. Thousands of people lost all their money. Many filed for bankruptcy. Some prominent citizens lost their lives and reputations. And Mehta became the most wanted man in India.
Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story is a riveting account of a man who started out small and, in an incredibly short period of time, amassed the kind of staggering fortune that most people only dream of. The web series, which runs for ten lengthy episodes, is not only a detailed sketch of Mehta and her clearly dubious paths and her close cohorts, but is also a portrait of an India that was on the brink of momentous change. Liberalization was sweeping the domains of the Raj license. Change was coming, but there were gaps between the old creaky ways of doing things and the new ways: Mehta found those gaps, dug deep into them, and turned the system inside out.
The series is based on the book The Scam: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Away, by financial journalists Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu. It opens with Dalal, played by Shreya Dhanwanthary, receiving advice from a harassed SBI official about a ‘ghotala’ involving Rs 500 crore. Both the immensity of the sum and the haunting anxiety on the man’s face (Sharib Hashmi) put Dalal and his partner Debashish on the trail of the story that blew the lid off the biggest scam of the time, unraveling the unholy nexus. between the banks. Indian and foreign financial institutions, high government officials, and powerful gods. Was it Chandraswami, the saffron-clad motor and agitator that could shake governments at that time? The series doesn’t name him, but he does look a lot like him.
My eyes go glassy when they hear the word ‘the market’, but I have to say that Scam 1992 hooked me, it kept me that way throughout, even though some parts felt a bit stretched and loose. The writing is fantastic and the recreation of that time and its authentic people. The Mehtas are not Gujaratis who speak as if they were on a kitchen sink television series; Harshad and his brother, their wives and their mother feel like a traditional joint family that has never forgotten their roots, even as they move from their modest suburban Kandivili home to their bright Worli penthouse with a rooftop pool. looking out over the Arabian Sea, and a fleet of luxury cars in the parking lot. The parts where Mehta is learning the basics of the market also feel real; the only place where it doesn’t feel as crowded is when you move into the newspaper office and news gathering area – in a way that’s a set, as it almost always is in a filmed version, in the way that the the stock market never is.
We have, for example, that Dalal is a passionate journalist, completely convinced of the veracity of her story, but would she have responded just as harshly to an editor? (The snippets showing the legendary R Laxman wandering the Times building are a delight, however.) You wouldn’t even have noticed these minor things in any other series, precisely because they are so minor, but they appear in contrast only because the rest are so spot on.
Dhanwanthary is credible. Like the actor who plays Basu. There are other great casting options. KK Raina as the conspiratorial banker, Nikhil Dwivedi as the soft-spoken ‘foreign’ banker who hates the guts of the cheeky Mehta, calling him a ‘b – and paanwala’, Satish Kaushik as the rough old purse who owns the word, Rajat Kapoor as the CBI officer who swears as fluently as he uses his fists, and many others. But the series never strays too far from Mehta, the runner from poverty to wealth who aroused equal doses of envy and admiration from fans and detractors alike, and is portrayed with absolute conviction by Pratik Gandhi.
The series begins in the 80s and takes us to 2000, and we see Gandhi grow old, his face wrinkled, his hair gray. But his attitude never changes: he is the ‘Amitabh Bachchan’ of the stock market, and as he likes to say, ‘Harshad ka raj ma, toh market majaa ma’. Bachchan’s name appears at frequent intervals, clearly drawing our attention to the fact that if one was a screen superhero, the other was the common man’s hero.
The Hansal Mehta-directed series (Jay Mehta gets a co-directing credit) does a clever balancing act, never leaning toward Harshad’s adulation, nor does it portray him as an outright villain. What we get is a complex, fully grown individual, such a man of his time and place and circumstances and abilities, and for that alone, this series is a winner.
If you ask them directly, the people who were covering Harshad Mehta’s story at the time won’t go so far as to call him a criminal (which clearly was: what do you call someone who breaks all the rules and does clearly illegal things? To fill their own coffers. ?). What they will say is that he was an intelligent man who did what he could to fulfill his dreams, while managing to convince himself and the docile men that they should have known better, as well as those who had their eye on the main opportunity, what what I was doing wasn’t exactly wrong, it was just taking advantage of loopholes in the system, which needed a fix anyway.
A prestigious business magazine cover at the height of Mehta’s seemingly unstoppable market career called him ‘The Raging Bull’. The accompanying story sounded as dazzled by him as was the general “meeting.” What everyone forgot is that a rise always comes before a big drop. And finally, that’s what it was, a warning: greed isn’t always good.
📣 The Indian Express is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@indianexpress) and stay up to date with the latest headlines
For the latest entertainment news, download the Indian Express app.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
.
