Books › The scam
The scam
First published 1993 · 360 pages
A breathless, high-stakes plunge into the intoxicating highs and devastating lows of India's most audacious financial frauds.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like watching a high-speed train derail in slow motion; you know the crash is coming, but you cannot look away from the sheer audacity of the engineers. It moves with a propulsive, thriller-like momentum, stripping away the dry jargon of the financial world to expose a chaotic, electric underbelly of greed and systemic failure. The mood is tense and cynical, steeped in the intoxicating allure of easy money and the inevitable, crushing weight of hubris. The prose is sharp and journalistic, guiding the reader through complex webs of deceit with authoritative clarity. It will thoroughly delight fans of true crime and financial exposes who crave a gripping, outrage-inducing deep dive into the mechanics of monumental fraud.
- Mood
- high-stakes
- tense
- chaotic
- electric
- outraged
- Tone
- investigative
- urgent
- cynical
- authoritative
- gripping
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- systemic corruption · allure of easy money · institutional failure · hubris and downfall · white-collar greed
- The writing
- Sharp, journalistic, and highly accessible, translating complex financial jargon into a fast-paced thriller.
- The arc
- From breathless fascination with audacious financial acrobatics to simmering outrage at systemic complicity and failure.
- Who it's for
- Readers who devour true crime, financial thrillers, and deep-dive investigative journalism about systemic loopholes.
Content notes
- financial ruin
- systemic corruption
- white-collar crime
About the book
The most thrilling non-fiction business book ever written in India. A fast, colourful narrative, knitting together the life and times of all stock market players involved in two of India's biggest stock market scams.The Scam, a chronicle of two of the most famous scams in the Indian stock markets, is now back in a digital avatar. The story told by Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu, can't find a more credible and informed couple of storytellers for these events. First published in April 1993, the book was an immediate bestseller but had been out of print for a while. This 8th edition of the scam includes the original Harshad Mehta Scam and the Ketan Parekh Scam, while also delving into the JPC Fiasco and the Global Trust Bank Scam. The basic question that the book deals with is, "what really happened in the two great Indian scams?" The answer to this question, detailed in the book, brings up another important one, "Have we learnt anything since, so that such things don't happen again?"
Description from Open Library.
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