Scam 2003: The Telgi Story Review: Entertaining encore with a nuanced lead performance

Gagan Dev Riar as Abdul Karim Telgi in Tushar Hiranandani's 'Scam 2003', about the Rs 30,000 crore stamp paper scam of the early 2000s.

“Main jahanum se hi nikala hu zindagi bnaane”, Abdul tells an irate accomplice through the writhing pain of a physical injury, in a scene from SonyLIV’s Scam 2003: The Telgi Story. It’s a scene that accentuates the fine line that separates this second season from the landmark first. Though their underdog narratives echo similarities - the familiar rise-and-fall tale of unlikely protagonists – Telgi’s story is more than just a longstanding cash-grab gone wrong. It embodies the playful energy of a heist, the doggedness of a sports story and the perversion of something bordering on cynical. Moreover, it is anchored by another remarkable performance that is as much about the unassertive body, as it is about the slippery boldness that it contrasts.

Thespian Gagan Dev Riar plays Telgi, in a second season that plays it by the book written by Hansal Mehta. We begin the story in Khanapur, where Riar’s own narration walks us through the impoverishment and deep sense of indignity, that kindled in Telgi the desperate need to make a life for himself. To pay for his school and college fees, he famously sold fruits at the train station. Impressed by his social skills, a man from Bombay offers him a ticket to a better tomorrow – a job at his guest house. A natural at parlour tricks, Telgi spends time in Mumbai, before heading to the gulf in search of further opportunities. It’s perhaps this portion of his life, that though inconsequential to his most noticeable pursuits, feels missing as a character building exercise.

Upon his return from the gulf, Telgi starts a ‘pushing’ scam where he prepares fake documents to send equally needy Indians abroad. Accosted by the police, even arrested at one point, he then learns the ropes of counterfeiting from an acquaintance he meets in jail. Thus begins the unlikely, but dizzying journey of a man nourished by ambition and diseased by the impatience to make it. Unlike the first season, this story is speckled with dirt and grime from the outset. Disenfranchised from birth, the fabric of Telgi’s cold-blooded aspirations stand in naked contrast with the somewhat stylized protagonist of the first season. Here, systems are mapped so they can instantaneously be ripped apart, lessons learned so they can be employed to alter the vocabulary of a rigid system. At one point, Telgi uses a metaphor about urine mixing in water, as a way to argue that nobody would bother catching pilferage in a larger pond of earnestness. In essence, it’s a metaphor that perfectly articulates India’s evolution to the point of awareness that necessitates self-cleansing.

Though the directorial lens, held this time round by Tushar Hiranandani, can’t quite match the ingenuity of Mehta’s first season, it still somewhat reprises the trialled tricks of old. Nothing feels hurried, or manicured in the sense that period dramas can so easily become. The performances, the mannerisms padding them and the art direction are all perfectly in-sync with a narrative that draws on desperation as a form of pitiable perversion. Telgi falls for a bar dancer, but never really exhibits violent degeneracy. He is dogged in a sorry kind of manner. Even while being kicked down by a bunch of rival goons, he stares hungrily at pieces of paper that might clue him onto his next big breakthrough. Luck, the show tells us, is the distillation of dumb persistence. “Thora daring toh karna padega naa,” Telgi argues repeatedly over the course of the show.

The Scam franchise – if we can now call it that – has always been bullish about its casting intuitions. While the first season gave us what is possibly Indian streaming’s greatest performance yet with Pratik Gandhi, its second produces another marvel with Riar’s disappearing act as a man whose only inheritance at birth may be his comprehensive lack of franchise. “Itne badsurat admi ko main nahi bhulta,” a man remarks about him in jail. His pockmarked face, dusky skin and bloated paunch strap the show to an unflattering but effective design. So much so that each softly delivered idiom, every tear that rolls down Telgi’s swollen cheeks feels unadulterated by the slightest hint of stardom. Certain performances, like their subjects, must come from nowhere. It’s possibly why Telgi’s blank, in-your-face conviction can also at times feel like a satirical crease neatly folded into its more self-serious grammar.

Scam 2003 isn’t quite as ingenuous or meticulously controlled as the first, but it still manages to intrigue and evoke compassion for an unsettling protagonist. A protagonist whose comparatively edgier exploits can at times echo heist-like sensuality. But whose crumbling humanity, Riar’s performance, its bewitching composition of both soft, disgruntled grace and blunt provocation captures to near perfection. It’s for these diamonds in the rough of ignorance and anonymity that another Scam, its path-breaking manual, must be propositioned. If nothing else, streaming at least owes us more Gandhis and Riars.

Scam 2003 The Telgi Story is now streaming on SonyLIV.