LIGHT

Bombay — Late 1980’s 

The blip of light came on the grey Konark brand TV screen as Gaitonde pressed and switched on the buttons on the bulky black and white ’idiot box’

It was time for the start of the Doordarshan programmes.

The logo which resembled some as an Eye or to others, influenced by cosmic theory, yin and yang with a Sanskrit scripted Doordarshan in the moon in the centre sprung up on the screen.

Satyam Shivam Sundaram, again Sanskrit scripted, ran across the bottom completing the design.

The DD signature tune composed by Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Ahmed Hussain Khan played out followed by the start of the programmes.

Gaitonde watched as the programme started and a Physics professor was blabbering the information on ’Light’

He lectured -- ’’When we mention light it usually refers to visible light which is electromagnetic radiation within the electromagnetic spectrum that can be perceived by the human eye.

Visible light is usually defined as having wavelengths in the range of 400/700 nanometers, or 4.00 × 10−7 to 7.00 × 10−7 m, between the infrared -with longer wavelengths- and the ultraviolet -with shorter wavelengths.

This wavelength means a frequency range of roughly 430–750 terahertz’’

It all sounded very classroom babble and Gaitonde yawned as he sat on his chequered bedsheet cloth-covered sofa in his small Bombay flat watching the screen.

The lecture moved on to the bald bespectacled professor then explaining Optics. He lectured -----’’ In a dispersive prism, material dispersion -- a wavelength-dependent refractive index--causes different colours to refract at different angles, splitting white light into a spectrum

It can be used to break white light up into its constituent spectral colours —the colours of the rainbow’’

Subconsciously Gaitonde was brooding over his past when this information from the professor blaring from the TV hit him like a bolt of lightning and brought him back to Mother Earth!!

LIGHT ---////---- PRISM

In layman terms, he had understood from this professor that white light, when passed through a prism, could expose and bring out the light's ‘TRUE COLOURS’

He had to be the PRISM and expose the true colours of the present shining phoney LIGHT— Dharampal!!

Gaitonde had lost out financially and been duped with a huge amount of his savings in Dharmapal’s desi ‘Ponzi’ schemes.

His ‘chit funds’ paid huge amounts to early investors with money put in by the recent investors.

People who invested believed that profits were coming from some other sort of business.

They were unaware that the other new investors were funding their profits.

Investors contributed more money building up the funds and it worked as long as people did not demand full repayment and believed that they had assets which were actually non-existent and only on paper.

His network of motivated agents also helped build up the pyramid of people investing not knowing that all of them were ‘bakra’s’ in the setup.

Gaitonde had invested but was now apprehensive.

He realised that it was an ‘Iska Topi - Uska Sir’ technique and there would be a lot of losers if the bubble burst.

However, at present it was not under the authorities radar so would continue to make money for Dharampal.

Gaitonde had managed to cut his losses and withdraw with a financial hit.

However, he could not convince others to do it.

He was frustrated at the way other people still believed that they had their hand in a great chit fund and would hit jackpots.

Dharampal was donating left, right and centre to educational institutions, places of religion and orphanages.

However, it was a secret that his ill-gotten wealth was being used to front his legal activities and philanthropy.

No one dared to point a finger at him.

In society, he was a shining beacon of Light.

Gaitonde had to create a chink in this armour.

As the chit funds were well established locally and were believed in by the investors he had to find shortcomings in Dharampal’s other schemes.

He tripped onto the Railway insurance scheme.

He found out that Dharampal was robbing the Indian Railways of income and revenue in Bombay.

It was a very simple operated scheme.

The train commuters ran in hundreds of thousands every minute of its operating schedule transporting the millions of passengers to the various station in the harbour, western and central lines.

The Bombay suburban railway system is a huge system carrying every day more than 5 million passengers over a rail network of 300 km in length, spread across an area of close to 500 square kilometres.

The honesty of passengers buying tickets is banked upon with minimal spot checks and if you are caught you pay a fine.

The odds of getting singled out among the crowd was very very low.

Dharampal gauged this and milked this shortcoming.

Using his chit fund agents he started a new secret insurance scheme.

Corrupt citizens who saw money-saving alternative bit into this bait.

And they joined secretly in thousands.

It took just Rs 300 to join as an upfront payment. After this, you travel ticketless on all journeys in Bombay.

His solution was that if you get caught travelling without a ticket you pay the authorities the fine and request the official fine receipt.

This receipt had then to be handed over to the agent who would immediately refund you the whole fine back on the spot.

The main criteria were that you had to pay the full official fine and not try and bribe the ticket checker or get into arguments with them.

They were assured that there was no fear of legal repercussions or jail.

He knew that in those days it was also not possible for the Ministries to safeguard the revenues of the system and ensure maximum revenue for the government.

There was a dearth in TC’s (ticket collectors) inversely proportional to the serpentine queues to buy tickets at stations.

Commuters with intention of cheating preferred to travel ticketless and now this scheme even guaranteed the fines at a very small one-off cost.

It worked in Dharampals favour.

The agents carried and maintained pocket diaries of their railway scheme clients with proper updates to a central accountant who then fed this into a basic computer system in the bosses office.

Imagine even in those days of late 1980s when the country was just getting tech-savvy, Dharampal had managed to make use of computers for his illegal operations.

All clients details including names, addresses, amounts collected as fees and amounts paid out as fines were religiously collated, maintained and updated on its ledgers on the bulky WIPRO - PC

This was a secret central database.

The system worked smoothly and Dharampal was making money on this.

Gaitonde did not know about the computer as this was a well-guarded secret.

However, as he had already been exposed to the network while he had paid into the chit fund schemes he knew a few of Dharampals agents and their dairies.

He had to somehow retrieve the dairies that the agents kept.

He realised that this would help him get a list of client names.

The film ’SHOLAY’ dialogue of Thakur Baldev Singh ‘Loha lohe ko katata hai' (the idiom implying diamond cuts diamond) reverberated in his ears.

He had to find a ‘pickpocket’ to pull this off.

He knew this resort was wrong but it was the only option out.

He managed to connect with Bala the local pickpocket.

Gaining his confidence as Bala also had been tricked into a Ponzi scheme, Gaitonde explained the need of the hour.

He handed him details of the six agents he knew and Bala using his skills, dexterity and misdirection managed to retrieve the required dairies in no time.

Tailing them it was a clean larceny operation of stumbling against some of the agents and pickpocketing them.

For others, Bala used the ‘hugging’ technique where Bala acting drunk and breaking down crying gained the sympathy of the agent and hugged him.

That contact was good enough to smoothly carry out the pickpocket.

All six diaries were now in the possession of Gaitonde.

Bingo — This was a jackpot.

It had a list of clients and importantly all diaries had one name in common — The Accountant.

However, Dharampals name did not feature in any of the diaries and as this was just information from 6 diaries the full scale of the operation was not yet revealed.

Gaitonde now had to make a move without alerting Dharampal.

Armed with the diaries he went to Mantralaya and requested a citizen meeting with a Minister.

The newly appointed Railway minister on his second come back had Konkan Railway project on his cards and had strived to overall increase productivity and revenue in the railways.

Gaitonde saw this as a ray of positivity.

He had to be the prism and work his way exposing the true colours of Dharampal using this Minister.

He managed to get the meeting and spill out his story showing the diaries as proof.

The minister was furious that Railway revenue was bleeding in this way immediately put the state machinery into action and ordered the agents arrests and simultaneous raids on Dharampal’s offices and residence.

In the process, all his dealings came to light.

He was arrested and he acknowledged the illegal operations like the railway insurance and chit fund schemes.

He was jailed with a long prison sentence.

The fake shiny white light of Dharampal was split.

His true colours were exposed.

Truth got to see the light of the day.

Justice was served.