Jamtara, Farzi, Scam 2003 & Crime's Gig Economy

Wolves Of Dalal Street

Scam 2003, Farzi and Jamtara have something vital to say about India's 'gig economy' of fraud, writes Manik Sharma.

“HUM ye duniya mein jeene ke liye nahi, hum log iss duniya mein kamane ke liye aate hain,” Abdul (Gagan Dev Riar), says in a scene from Scam 2003: The Telgi Story. Throughout a series littered with philosophical aphorisms, Abdul packs an overexposed lunchbox of thoughts. Everything he says, he pretends to believe and everything he pretends to believe, he makes a point of saying. It’s his way of glueing together enough angst to build a forceful collective operation. Only anger and resentment, he has sensed, work as adhesives. It takes the angst of many to trickle into the witless fury of a few, who eventually choose to directly stare at the sun.

It’s why Abdul comes across as a better motivational speaker than he does a schemer. It’s also why the greatest trick that Sunny (Shahid Kapoor) pulls in Farzi isn’t the counterfeiting of bank notes but the intimate relationship he feigns, to dupe a government agent. In the gig economy of frauds, scam and service, product and perseverance are interchangeable entities, but what remains consistent through them all, is the perpetrator’s ability to milk and mould the people dealing with its geometry.

STREAM SCAM 2003

50 SHADES OF GREY

The Cultural Economy Of Financial Crime, From Scam To Farzi & Jamtara

By Manik Sharma

In Netflix’s Jamtara, two young rudderless men build a phishing operation through sheer doggedness. Their greatest strength, however, is their ability to negotiate with the ladder of power, moisten its creaky joints, while attracting lusting, submissive bees. It evidently takes an extrovert to become the fulcrum of an operation that runs on communication and command. In fact, across these stories, social tricks count for much more than academic genius. Networking, these shows suggest, is the bedrock of the fraud economy. For Jamtara it is literally the case. Opportunity can only really be borrowed or shared. Which is why the kitchen of a scam, though it might seem like a singular place, must serve platters of all shapes and sizes — be it to the bureaucracy, political influence, the judicial eye or in-house rats.

In Farzi, Sunny is a small-time painter people broadly refer to as ‘the artist’. In Scam, Telgi starts out as an impoverished hawker before turning to forging documents for expats. In Jamtara Rocky and Sunny, are directionless young men looking to make a quick buck. There are all, in a sense, outsiders to the food chain; outsiders who won’t eat the meal they are told to, nor cook one that the system would serve as its own. Ironically, the break-free alternative to this rigidity is another shaky constitution. Because in order to keep its biggest slice, our anti-heroes must replicate systems they have been kept out of. Tragicomically, there is no autonomy in fraud either, just the winning hook that a life in crime begins and ends with.

Furthermore, systems, these stories argue, only accommodate that which they can subdue. The greatest con, therefore, isn’t to necessarily demolish them, but to hoodwink their own growling sense of impenetrability. Sunny therefore manufactures his own currency notes while Telgi forges stamp papers. Both feed the old chain without waking its conscience. It’s the system’s pompousness that this feels like a rebuke of. Counterfeiting not as an act of imitation, but of creation. Of a new kind of austerity that is dictated by the ends, as opposed to the righteous means it takes to get there. Fraud, in essence, is a sighting of the flaw our institutions continue to believe they are the answers to.

The gig economy of financial crime also apes that which it wishes to challenge. Nothing can be built without order, aka corporatisation, per se. Structure, that over-abused but misunderstood term in corporate parlance, asserts its relevance even in the endeavours of fraud. Breakaway, mutinous businesses are merely re-imaginations of designs that already exist. There are owners, CEOs, managers and consultants all the same. It’s why our protagonists have friends, enablers, confidants, intimate weaknesses and by extension, traitors. An enterprising economy, whether it is raised on sweat or the coldness of crime, will eventually answer to the same principles of business. The system though it can be spiked remains an inevitable force of nature. It eventually comes around.

It’s curious but maybe also telling that across streaming platforms, across genres of fiction and creative non-fiction ( Scam is based on actual financial frauds from India’s history) the protagonists always harbour a sense of injustice. To them the prologue of their lives has been written as a warning. The rewards, almost all of them, they have been unjustly asked to earn. To men and women born on the race track, on the run from destitution, retribution doesn’t quite reside in a horse worth betting on. Instead it resides in a race worth recreating from scratch. A race that would reconsider their will, as a rule. Nobody capable of thinking that far, or that boldly would ever reconsider contentment as that final lap. Tellingly therefore, only the layout of the race changes. The desperation of it all, the reason behind the descent, all look the same. Our anti-heroes fall, the moment they start to think of themselves as the hero.

Always get the latest reviews. Sign up for our newsletters.

Like what you read? Get more of what you like. Visit the OTTplay website, or download the app to stay up-to-date with news, recommendations and special offers on streaming content.

OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS

This weekly newsletter compiles a list of the latest (and most important) reviews from OTTplay so you can figure what to watch or ditch over the weekend ahead.

Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think it worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over.

In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an
hour on this.