This documentary has a separate director for each individual episode and doesn’t shed any new light on these three newsmakers. Everything that the makers showcase is very much available in the public domain. But what it does is, bring all that information together coherently and weave a pretty engrossing narrative. Divided into three separate episodes, the one with Mallya is called ‘The King of Good Times’, the one with Modi is aptly titled ‘Diamonds aren’t forever’, and the one featuring Roy is called ‘The world’s biggest family’. The series crunches inches and inches of newsprint and hours and hours of news footage into a ‘Cliffs Notes’ version of what really happened. It’s how the narrative is stitched that is noteworthy.
We get a sneak peek into the world of Vijay Mallya, and his lavish parties and how he craved glamour and liked being the centre of attention. We see the meteoric rise of Mallya, and his eventual crash and the Rs 9000 crore loan that he had defaulted upon.
A similar storyline is woven for Nirav Modi, this jeweller who had risen out of nowhere, and was even featured on the cover of Sothebys. We meet people who worked with him, and some for him. A lot is said about his attention to detail and how he too loved the high life. Eventually, it all came tumbling down, when a bank employee retired, and his successor was unable to provide the same ‘flexible’ and ‘easy’ terms to Modi.
The episode with Subrata Roy is the longest, and perhaps the one that impacts the aam junta the most. We see a dramatised version of a young Roy in his 30’s roaming around the UP hinterland on his Lambretta, and there is a Kinley water bottle in the basket of the scooter. Roy had the poorest of Indians invest in what can be called a ‘pyramid scheme’, where many had divested their hard-earned daily wages into a scheme which promised that their investment would ‘double or triple’ in a said amount of time. He allegedly used that investment to fund his airlines, his dream project of Amby Valley and his company’s sponsorship of the Indian cricket team. Roy was even jailed for two years. He is currently out on bail.
