Gita Mehta, whose books transformed Western ideas on India, died today at her home in New Delhi. She was 80.
19.09.2023 - 10:21 / variety.com
Naman Ramachandran India’s Hansal Mehta has scored his second successive streaming hit of the year with SonyLIV series “Scam 2003 – The Telgi Story.” This follows his earlier success with Netflix show “Scoop.” Based on Sanjay Singh’s book “Telgi: A Reporter’s Diary,” “Scam 2003” is written by Kiran Yadnyopavit, Kedar Patankar and Karan Vyas. It follows the story of Abdul Karim Telgi, the mastermind behind a scam printing counterfeit stamp paper in India, which earned $3.8 billion. A stamp paper is a government-issued blank document with headers of varying financial values that are used to validate most business transactions in India.
The show is the second in the “Scam” series after SonyLIV’s “Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story,” also created by Mehta. This time around, Mehta entrusted directing duties to Tushar Hiranandani as he wanted fresh eyes on the material. Mehta was also busy wrapping “Scoop.” “‘Scam,’ ‘Scoop,’ all of them are stories of ordinary people who follow a certain arc – who are down and out, ordinary, not people that you would notice on the streets, and then doing things that make them public figures all of a sudden,” Mehta told Variety.
“In Telgi, you have this man from a small town becoming this man who actually printed stamp papers. These were not fake stamp papers for the simple reason that they were real stamp papers because he stole an entire printing press, got the same suppliers for the paper, everything was genuine. There’s no way to say that this is fake and this is real – the audacity of that scam was something,” Mehta said.
Gita Mehta, whose books transformed Western ideas on India, died today at her home in New Delhi. She was 80.
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