Scam 1992 : A Review of sorts (?)

A 'fact' that most of us have almost happily reconciled with is that the financial section in any newspaper/ magazine is reserved only for our fathers; sitting in the balcony sipping their morning cup of coffee or tea silently digesting news about shares, bonds and mutual funds with a pair of spectacles perched atop the nose. 

When such a perception is so deeply ingrained in the mind of your audience, how do you take something as layered as a financial crime and break it down into an engaging web series? What worked for me with Scam 1992 was that it did not attempt to simplify or explain to the viewer the manner of perpetration of the many many financial crimes that were clearly prevalent in the Indian markets on the brink and the immediate aftermath of Liberalisation.  

The web series, built on The Scam : Who won, Who lost, Who got away? co-authored by Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu chronicles the man behind what was, in it's time the biggest 'scam' of the country.

I am pursuing chartered accountancy and during my articleship (for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, think of it as a 3 year long internship that I've got to complete in order to become eligible to take my final exams), the first engagement I was posted on was a bank audit. Completely fresh out of school, with little to no knowledge about anything, over the course of a year, I learnt a fair bit about how banks function. (let's not even venture into any technical accounting or auditing aspects). The knowledge that I have, of course, is still very limited, but it has definitely helped me to better understand movies and dramatisations of financial crimes of various kinds, which seem to be releasing in abundance off late. 

We have Bad boy billionaires and Ozark on Netflix, Scam 1992 on Sony Liv and of course, time tested favourites such as The Big Short and Margin Call. However, screenplays centred around white collar crime seem to have caught our fancy only recently, in the past decade or so. In fact, even today, the majority of the population would probably prefer watching a detective unravel a blood splattering murder over a financial analyst discovering some number fudging. Another perspective would be that if one wanted to pen a fictionalised account, it is perhaps easier to acquaint yourself with matters of poison than with the vast multitude of avenues by which a financial crime may be perpetrated. Not to forget, arsenic consumption will kill - whether you're in the Mylapore or in Miami; but what's illegal in one country may be permissible within the laws of another, so where will you draw the line and how much can you grapple with for the sake of factual accuracy without a finance background yourself?

Which is why, most finance-oriented 'thrillers' tend to be rooted in reality. Something else to be kept in mind is that there is always a face to the victim in blue collar crime which automatically rouses a primal justice-ought-to-be-served instinct in the audience. On the other hand, when you're dealing with money laundering or embezzlement who will you personify as the victim and how will you get people to invest themselves in the story? Perhaps the easiest way to overcome this is with complex characters driving the plot forward. 

One such character I identified with completely in the series was that of Sucheta Dalal essayed by Shreya Dhanwanthary. Far from the maverick journalists we're so used to seeing on screen, she is earnest and principled but determined to have her way once convinced about the accuracy of her 'story'. With all the hullaballoo about 'trial by media' over the past few months and the circus that much of Indian television journalism seems to have turned into, it is refreshing to see someone so thorough in her fact checking process and so eager to give both sides of the coin a fair opportunity to have their side of the narrative in print. 

More often that not, we rarely ever get to see or read about the other facets of someone who has given the law a slip of the hand. The spotlight is usually on the crime and the investigation thereon. Scam 1992, however, outlines the lives of its protagonists, be it a rags to riches arc or the underlying insecurity driving the actions of 'established' characters, so to speak and we realise that there is more these people than the facts that catapulted them to infamy. 

Something I learnt during that aforementioned bank audit was the process of 'SGL Reconciliation' where banks are required to reconcile the balances of securities (treasury bills, government securities, shares and bonds) as held by them vis-a-vis the details as per the records of the RBI's Public Debt Offices (PDO). The process is the fundamental technical principle on which the entire series is driven and that is perhaps why I found myself completely interested in the story right from the first few minutes. Even if you have no idea what any of these three alphabet acronyms mean, I have no doubt that you too, will click that 'next' button till you reach the tenth and penultimate episode.