: Scam 1992: Retells a complex saga (IANS Review; Rating: * * * and 1/2) #IndiaNEWS #Cinema Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story (series streaming on SonyLIV); Cast: Pratik Gandhi, Shreya Dhanwanthary,

Scam 1992: Retells a complex saga (IANS Review; Rating: * * * and 1/2) #IndiaNEWS #Cinema
Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story (series streaming on SonyLIV); Cast: Pratik Gandhi, Shreya Dhanwanthary, Nikhil Dwivedi, Sharib Hashmi, KK Raina, Rajat Kapoor, Satish Kaushik, Anant Mahadevan; Direction: Hansal Mehta; Rating: * * * and 1/2 (three and a half stars)
There is a basic challenge that Hansal Mehta throws, while narrating the story of Big Bull Harshad Mehta. Instead of letting his story unfold through the mind games of his protagonist, which would have made the series lucid and enjoyable for all, he often tends to immerse the narrative in a mire of heavy stock market lingo and logistics.
Perhaps Hansal Mehta was deliberately being uncompromising, to underline the fact that his 10-part web series is a rare Bollywood effort that truly tick-marks all criteria of the genre that Hollywood defines as the financial thriller. Yet, from Wall Street to Margin Call to Equity to The Wolf Of Wall Street you could even include Money Monster by a stretch we have seen enough instances where crime drama woven around money does not necessarily let money matters overwhelm the human factor of the story.
This aspect of Hansal Mehtas latest effort is pertinent because if you gloss over that glitch, Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story is nothing short of brilliant as a biopic. The show tackles one of the most enigmatic stock market stories of Independent India, and it brings alive an era bygone with impressive detail.
Stockbroker Harshad Mehtas life story on screen is based on Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basus book, The Scam: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Away. Harshad rose from lower-middle class obscurity to become a Bombay stock market trader whose heady success would fetch him titles ranging from Big Bull to Raging Bull to Amitabh Bachchan of Dalal Street.
Harshad died at 47, after a meteoric rise and an equally dramatic ruin. At the time of death there were 70 criminal and 600 civil cases filed against him and family, according to this story. In between rise and fall, he was charged with financial crimes that underlined the Rs 5,000-crore securities scam of 1992. It was a scam that saw the Indian market collapse and stocks crash.
The script (Saurav Dey, Karan Vyas, Sumit Purohit and Vaibhav Vishal) captures Harshads life well, as he breathes life into Mumbais Dalal Street with his unorthodox but morally pliable gameplan. Hansal Mehtas cinematic efforts are admirable for the way they capture the complexities of life beneath a deceptively simplistic milieu, we have seen in films such as Aligarh, Shaheed and CityLights. Scam 1992 brings alive Mumbai of the eighties and the nineties, and mixes the laidback lifestyle of a pre-digital era with the manic frenzy that Harshad Mehta triggers off.

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