PEAK

It was peak hour at the bank. The line snaked along the building sides as the queue kept getting longer.

People were getting impatient and onlookers were perplexed at this spectacle.

They had never seen such crowds or queue’s here before.

News started spreading that there was some impropriety which would lead to that bank’s crash.

This news also spread verbally like wild fire that people were rushing to the bank to get out their savings and money in time.

People over the years had put in their life hard earned savings in deposits at this bank.

The safe deposit lockers were stashed with peoples jewellery and important documents.

They could not afford to loose it.

Unknown to most onlookers 15 people of around 40 in the queue were on a common secret mission.

The mission ‘A planned rundown of bank’

This mission was spearheaded and planned intricately by Babu.

On the receiving end of their mission was Seth Ghanshyamdas.

Ghanshyamdas was a crook.

He was a rich crooked crook.

Born to middle class parents he realised somewhere in mid journey of his life that money was the solution to all of life’s problems.

Having it would buy you comforts, respect and position in society.

Slowly his life was being steered towards this false goal and every action and decision he took was initiated by this.

Starting small he took leaps in building up his business and accumulating wealth of un proportionate levels in the process.

Using fronts he set up business involved in black marketing and gambling.

His legitimate businesses were a small percentage of what he had brewing in the pots of illegitimate businesses.

His dress sense of wearing a typical politician dress style of khadi suits topped with a Gandhi cap tried to paint him in a ‘Desh Bakht’ bracket.

He had to ‘Topi pehnao’ lot of people along the way.

He hid behind a big long red vermillion tilak which adorned his forehead completing his aura of a religious human being throwing off scent anyone suspecting his persona and exposing his true self.

Very cleverly he started involving himself and spending money, positioning his image and trying to paint a squeaky clean facade to hide his real dark side.

He was aware that to be in a prime position he had to have close proximity to local politics and politicians.

Keeping this in mind he donated handsomely to all politicians with both hands making sure each hand did not know whose pocket the other hand was greasing.

In this way he made peace and pacts with all parties and even opposing politicians keeping all of them happy to be in his good favours

These small moves made sure he was in the good books of the right people.

His ultimate goal in life was to open a bank and now all that he plotted in his scheme of events was towards achieving it.

Employing the best crooked accounting team he managed to go through the formalities and set up his dream.

Proud was he when Ghanshyamdas Small Finance Bank located in the prime spot in the main chowk opened its doors to the public.

It was the first of its kind in this village.

He had reached PEAK of his success.

The bank had managed to lure and attract the locals and surrounding villagers to deposit money increasing the kitty of the bank.

A lot of them were brainwashed in shifting their accounts which they had in the national banks.

Babu who had a ‘ji’ respectfully added on as a suffix was truly worth the title.

He was the local high school teacher in the village school.

Apart from teaching history and geography to the high school students he imparted knowledge of how to live as a true human being.

Ha had a loving persona and a simple way of life.

Having recently moved into the village he was slowly settling in the new environment.

The locals however ushered him with speed into their hearts.

As he went about his daily routines he slowly noticed how all that was unsocial had some connection to Ghanshyamdas Small Finance Bank.

Watching from out of the box gave him an insight that local villagers turned a blind eye to.

He noticed that the recently appointed local inspector was a very

truthful and incorruptible lady officer — Inspector Bhapra.

However because she refused to blend in with the local corrupt politics she got transferred out of the area within 3 months of her posting.

Ghanshyamdas had a hand in this.

The local news editor also was a mouth piece for Seth Ghanshyamdas so the fourth estate was a puppet in his hands.

Seth Ghanshyamdas had to be pushed off the peak of his corrupt hill and only a stampede of ‘janta’ could accomplish this.

Babuji realised that realisation of corruption had to come to the people themselves and this could only happen if their financial security was jeopardised.

Slowly he started gathering around him about 20 villagers whom he had assessed shared his view but were silent for fear of reprisals.

He got assurance that they would be committed to carrying out this mission to its hilt.

Over the week he made sure each and everyone of them had gone and opened a saving account in this bank.

Those were the days when opening an account in a bank was a simple procedure.

You could open a saving account even with Rs 10 and there was no minimum amount required.

To have a cheque book facility you had to keep minimum Rs 50 as balance in the account.

Just with Rs 10- 25, each and every one of them managed to get the account up and going and got pay in slip books issued.

Between 11 and 11.30 am on D- Day 15 of them approached the bank from different directions and started entering the bank.

As there were just two counters a queue started forming which spilled out into the street.

Every member knew what he had to do.

Digging out varied amounts varying from Rs 10 to Rs 25 they took their own sweet time to reach the counter and fiddled and fumbled at the counter to complete a transaction of deposit or withdrawal with the counter clerk.

The queue was moving very slowly but as they were genuine transactions no alarm bells rang in the bank officials mind.

Once they finished their business at the counter they slowly ambled to the back of the queue to just feed into the queue.

This process made a visual effect of the queue not receding and in the meantime genuine bank users also added onto the length of the serpentine queue.

In the meantime the other 5 members slowly started spreading a false news in various parts of the village that something funny was going on in the bank and people were queuing up to withdraw their savings.

Dramatics were used to emphasis that they themselves also had to rush to the bank to save and get hold of their money.

It is said that the inquisitiveness of people is so high in most places in India that if you stand in the middle of the road and stare and point at a particular spot in the sky everyone around you will stop stare at the spot and ask — Kya hua bhai ?

Similarly it is easy to start a stampede.

If just five people jump up and start screaming and running you would probably have half a maidan of 500 people stampeding with them.

That was herd mentality in it’s true sense.

This was the psychology that Babuji was using to show the true face of Seth Ghanshyamdas.

When people actually saw the queues they panicked and all those who had accounts rushed to jump in the bandwagon

Within the hour there was chaos and angry crowds demanding more staff being pulled in to deal with the withdrawal requests.

Ghanshyamdas was in a fix.

In the meantime his hooligans intervened to break up the crowd using rough methods.

This agitated the ‘janta’ even more and people started discussing Ghanshyamdas’s actual role in the poison spread about in the village.

The local police and the ruling politicians could not calm down the crowd.

They had to distance themselves away from Ghanshyamdas and had to promise to start investigations of connections to bring him to justice to pacify the irate crowds.

Ghanshyamdas’s disguise had been stripped.

He was left perplexed and was still trying to understand how he had fallen from his peak

For Babuji — justice had at last been served.