As the grand drama of Yogi and the stock exchange unravels in a financial capital near us, our screens reveal an equally unbelievable fraud pulled off by a Russian scammer in another financial capital far away from us. Both gifts ran around the same time, both have women at the center, and both involve fraud, borrowing, trading, spending, misappropriating vast amounts of money.
In Mumbai, between 2013 and 2016, Chitra Ramakrishna, the then chairperson of India’s largest exchange, the NSE, claims she was in the throes of a holy man in the Himalayas who pulled her strings from afar and sought high appointments, princely salaries and Platform-managed. Full access to the National Stock Exchange database. Since the instructions came from a self-proclaimed ‘siddha purusha’, which is the Sanskrit equivalent of ‘open mole’, they went without any challenge.
In New York, between 2015 and 2017, Anna Sorokin aka Anna Delvey claimed to be an heir with a €60 million trust fund in Germany. Those magic words saw the smelly-rich drawing rooms, luxury hotels, banks and art salons unquestionably open their doors to Anna. By the time he was arrested, he had defrauded individuals and institutions of approximately $275,000. The Netflix series on his life is now airing; Anna sold the rights for $320,000, of which she had to pay $298,000 to lawyers and various people, but she retained the rest.
Anna is in custody; Chitra is being questioned by the CBI. By all accounts, both women were financially talented, highly intelligent, and lived a bit far from reality.
In both cases, the word that comes to mind is naivety. The people Anna went on to ride were completely blind to the dead gifts because all they saw was a guessed ‘image’, exactly what Anna trusted. A great report of 2018 New York magazine (which inspired Anna’s Invention Show) bristles with brand names. As long as Ana got her wine vintage right and carried the right Herms bag, she could have come from the lineage of a serial killer and Haute Monde might not have cared. Alas, he cut off the neat hands that sat him on the high table and was duly shown his place.
In the case of NSE, was Chitra really fascinated by the meditation of a hermit in the Himalayas? Or was she just a kind soul whose proper advice she followed unquestioningly and could later say that no one questions the ‘sage’. It is difficult to say what the directors of the NSE board were doing while all this was unfolding. Reports found that he was informed about Chitra’s dodging in 2016, to which he responded by giving her Rs. 50 crore severance package before gently showing him the door. We don’t know yet if they unrolled the red carpet in a waiting limo. With ups and downs like this, a life of financial crime seems positively healthful.
If champagne and splashes of brand names provide an easy entry into the highest social circles, India has always issued an additional entry stamp: a relationship with someone or something sacred. Prefixing anything with ‘Baba’, ‘Guru’ or ‘Yogi’ is a powerful key to opening the purse and turning off the brain’s natural defenses against stupidity. Even as scientists were struggling to find a cure for COVID-19, a baba created a magic potion overnight and found enough buyers and TV anchors to buy it. Hospital data, overflowing crematoriums, and the families of the dead can confirm certain COVID-19 numbers, but these are easily declassified by a yogi declaring that his handling of the pandemic is “one of the best in the world.” It’s good.
That’s the formula. Greed, a willing suspension of disbelief and the cursing of bogus spirituality. In the stories of Anna and Chitra, what strikes you is not that they may be deeply flawed individuals, as they are a dime a dozen, but how superficial the society’s association with truth is. By gleaning the right snobberies, Anna could live a life of luxury for the longest time; And by claiming that a mysterious holy man directed her acts of fraud and insider trading, Chitra can do the same. This is a deadly Indian weakness and today it is being manipulated brilliantly. If Ray were alive, he might have made a sequel and titled it Joy Baba Fekunath.
Where the author tries to understand the society with seven hundred words.
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