Like the Americans have made a habit of ravaging third-world countries with war and making films about them to assuage guilt, the new Indian trend seems to be to do the same with financial scams.
Last year, we had SonyLIV’s superhit series Scam 1992 which starred Pratik Gandhi as disgraced stockbroker Harshad Mehta. The same month, Netflix rolled out its docuseries Bad Boy Billionaires, which looked into the wheeling-dealing of Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Subrata Roy and Ramalinga Raju.
Such material produces a two-pronged thrill: the viewer gets to know how one games the system to make a quick buck, and, by the end, the anti-hero is punished, because popular entertainment’s job is to dispense moral values. In New India’s fiercely neoliberal political economy, where everything is up for grabs, and the Prime Minister exhorts citizens to be “atmanirbhar” (self-reliant), such stories will naturally be popular.
Watch Whistleblower trailer here:
SonyLIV’s nine-episode The Whistleblower highlights the Vyapam scam i.e the mass-scale rigging of admission exams and recruitment procedures for medical colleges and sundry government jobs organised and overseen by the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board, or the Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal (Vyapam). In the Madhya Pradesh-set series, the fictional examination board is Rashtriya Pariksha Mandal.
Under the Vyapam scam, talented proxies wrote exams for undeserving candidates, who went on to score seats, jobs, and become doctors....
YouTuber Jeon Han-gil, accused of defaming President Lee Jae Myung and Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok by spreading false information, attended a warrant review hearing. Seoul Central District Co...