Bad Boy Billionaires: India Netflix review | How they dream big with your money

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Netflix’s docuseries Bad Boy Billionaires: India was mired in controversy as soon as the September release date was announced. It was challenged in two courts, one in Bihar by Saharasri Subrata Roy and another in Hyderabad by Satyam’s Ramalinga Raju. But, with the Bihar court now vacating its stay order, we can now watch the story of three business tycoons and their alleged saga of greed and fraud.

India has always been a land of contradictions. The haves and the have nots travel side by side on Indian roads, and the lives of those living on the streets never ever intersect with the gigantic billboards advertising designer diamond jewelry. When the trailer to the Netflix series Bad Boy Billionaires: India showed up, many wanted to watch the downfall of these super rich men with a sense of glee. The documentary series promised so much more than just a statement of accounts of the alleged frauds, big dreams gone wrong.

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Three episodes of Bad Boy Billionaires: India sans the Ramalinga Raju episode was released this morning. I watched it wanting to feel some sense of outrage or some sense of identification with the small guy. Or be amazed at how the rich get away with doing things you and I couldn’t even think about.

Alas Bad Boy Billionaires does not make you sympathise with either. You come away thinking that the rich will continue doing what they do. You come away aghast at how nonchalant, how unrepentant Nirav Modi looks when he says, ‘No comment’ when the journalist confronts him about him being a fugitive, how he needs to pay back the creditors.

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But, there is no catharsis. The documentary does not offer us anything about how every account holder with the bank was paying the price of those unlimited Letters of Undertaking. The documentary gives all this information, but does not show how this scheme resulted in horrors for the common man who saw their savings go up in smoke.

In fact, when they interview people close to the three Bad Boy Billionaires, you wonder if they’re trying to soften their image! Kiran Mazumdar Shaw who says she’s known Vijay Mallya since they were children claims that ‘It’s his ego’, that Vijay Mallya is just ‘like a child’ when his dream airline went belly-up. You want to ask, ‘Who then should pay the price?’ They show you how the employees were not paid and how one of the wives even committed suicide.

Is it enough? It made me wonder if Vijay Mallya’s friends and family are all living in a bubble because they understand why he must invite Enrique Iglesias to his 60th birthday party and still not feel like he needs to compensate his employees who have not been paid! His son actually says that in hindsight, it was ‘bad optics’, but does not seem to realise that these men and their obsessions come across as more obscene than just a ‘party for the King of Good Times’.

Not just ours, but internationally it seems that the financial systems are broken, and the rich get away by continuing to borrow money, ask for loan upon loan and then spend their money fighting in courts while the common man has to struggle to make ends meet.

The Bad Boy Billionaires: India episode with Subrata Roy fascinated me most because he worked with the commonest man who did not have a permanent address or a bank account. This is shown rather well in the episode. But you know something’s missing when you are not given too many details as to how the money reached the privileged few on top of the pyramid.

The documentary shows how Saharasri earned that title and made over a million people believe that they would work for ‘the family’.

The series shows us how their circle of influence ensures that the people remain entranced. ‘His leather jacket was badass, no?’ Asks the advertising director who shot the Nirav Modi ads when he sees the footage of fugitive Nirav Modi being finally caught and cornered by a journalist in London. I am amazed.

How much money is enough, I wonder. Each of these men started out with a dream, and then could not or would not stop when things got out of hand. And no one seems to be able to tell them to stop. When does a bad boy face the consequences for his actions? Is there punishment for those who aid and abet?

Bad Boy Billionaires: India feels less cathartic than it should because the stories have not reached conclusions yet.

Manisha Lakhe Is A Poet, Film Critic, Traveller, Founder Of Caferati — An Online Writer’s Forum, Hosts Mumbai’s Oldest Open Mic, And Teaches Advertising, Films And Communication.