Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta story is by no doubt one of the best webseries on financial markets made to this date. It beautifully explains one of the biggest scams India has ever seen to commoners without confusing them with any technical jargon. But this article has nothing to do with the webseries itself, it is about people's perception of the scam, specifically youngster's perception.
After this series came out, all that you can hear from them is "I want to be the next Harshad Mehta". And rightly so. In one of my recent articles, I talked about how people aspire to be what fits their beliefs and fears. They want to be Harshad Mehta simply because it's cool to be Harshad Mehta. It's cool to have a rags to riches story and have a "I don't give a f " attitude towards everything. It's cool to act on your instincts and still have it all under control. It's cool to commit a crime and not get caught.
But is Harshad Mehta really cool though? It is cool to take business decisions based on emotions like jealousy and envy?Is it cool to exploit the system for your own good? Is it cool to be the reason of suicide of many people? Is it cool to die alone in jail from heart attack? It might be cool for some depending on their beliefs and fears but it's definately not a sustainable way of living.
You know what's cool though? Leaving a well settled life to start your own venture at the age of 35. When Harshad was rising to fame by manipulating market, somewhere in the small city of Pune, a few friends started a consulting company with an initial capital of just $250. In 1993, when harshad had just been dethroned and thrown behind bars, he filed for listing his brain child. It was undersubscribed and Morgan Stanley had to bail him out. It took him atleast 10 more years from there to rise to fame and prove his company's worth to the world. Ladies and gentlemen, whom we are talking about here is none other than N. R. Narayan Murthy and his brainchild Infosys.
But you know why people don't aspire to be like Narayan Murthy even though they look up to him with awe and respect? Because being Narayan Murthy is boring. Nobody wants to wake up every day to same problems, work consistently without any surety of success and deal with a system that has a lot of bureaucracy and red tapism. Making a quick buck off of some rich quick scheme is much easier even though the risk of failure is a lot higher, or should I say it's cool.