Greed Is Ponzi
There was a good idea here—a web series about ponzi schemes that prove the saying “there’s a sucker born every minute.” There have been so many major chit fund scandals in India, that if Hansal Mehta isn’t working on another series in his Scam franchise, it would be surprising. Anyway, TVF has reached this goal faster, with their show The Pyramid Scheme (on Amazon Prime Video), which does not have that blend of information and entertainment that the story could have achieved.
The eight-part show swings wildly between farce and family melodrama, reaching rather late the kernel of the plot – how such get-rich-quick swindles work, and how the perpetrators get away. (There really is no limit to gullibility, as horrid frauds like digital arrests show.)
Goldy (Paramveer Singh Cheema) runs a mobile phone store in Haridwar, and has to pay off the debts of his good-for-nothing father (Sadanand Patil). He is surrounded by a noisy gaggle of aunts, uncles and cousins—the clan ruled by the crotchety grandfather (Aanjjan Srivastav), called Babu by everyone.
While Goldy is grappling with his problems, a charismatic Tarun Bajaj (Shekhar Suman), with all the fervour of a fairground evangelist, floats his Jumbolife scheme. This promises unimaginable riches to those who join up, bring in four more people, who in term bring four more, till a ‘team’ or a pyramid is formed to sell the ‘multinational’ company’s spurious products. The head of the company, Daljeet Singh (Ravi Behl) pulls the strings from abroad, while his recruiters, Chunmun (Vijay Kumar), his wife Pramila (Smita Bansal) and successful Jumbolife team member Divyajyoti (Indresh Malik) keep their eyes peeled out for desperate prey. When debt collectors destroy Goldy’s shop, he walks into the trap.
The process of training the members and the ‘concerts’ addressed by the higher ups in the scheme are treated in a loud, farcical manner, with all actors overdoing the Jumbolife spiel to a crowd behaving like they were at a religious event.. Over the next episodes, Goldy sinks deeper into the quicksand, getting as his partner a disgraced music teacher, Manoj (Ranvir Shorey with oily comb over and Groucho Marx eyebrows). When they go to a village to recruit Goldy’s relatives, they realize that a few years ago, another such company, also run by Chunmun and Pramila, had conned them.
Instead of listening to the alarm bells, Goldy decides to make a success of the business in his own way.\ by sidelining the others. When Tarun tries to wrest money out of them for a concert appearance, Goldy turns Manoj, who has the gift of the gab, into a Jumbolife star. He becomes like a guru figure with hordes of adoring fans all over the state queuing up to buy tickets. Eventually, Goldy’s sceptical family are converted and a cousin even joins the team.
A lot of time is spent in concerts, picnics, a silly romance and family drama; Goldy and Manoj are even taken to Thailand for a conference, where Daljeet lures them into a dazzling real estate scheme. Because it all seems like fun and games, without anyone even questioning the con that is so obvious a child could see through it, at no point does that clenched-stomach feeling of dread hang over the plot, as the inevitable downslide knocks Goldy and Manoj sideways. As quickly as the dreams of plenty were waved before the thousands of naïve investors, they are snatched away. A shattered Goldy tries to unravel the fraud, that goes deeper than he imagined—though it is strange that incriminating documents are thrown in the trash without shredding!
Statistics are included in the show, about how many people have been financially ruined by such ponzi schemes, but there are new ones floated every day. The scam in the show is on a large scale, but at the working class level too, there is something called bhishi in which people put in money every month, hoping to hit a jackpot.
The Pyramid Scheme ought to have been a cautionary tale, if nothing else, but because writer Akshendra Mishra, and directors Ashish R. Shukla and Shreyansh Pandey do not take it seriously, nor are they able to fashion a sharp satire, the viewer is left baffled by the over-the-top comedy and tonal shifts. While everybody else is yelling or overacting or both, Cheema and the ever dependable Shorey somehow tie down their scenes to manageable levels of sanity, but it is an uphill task.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
