Apparently, my last column marked a new low in my so far undistinguished career as a journalist. Many readers have sent me long emails sharing their agony and disbelief at the fact that when there are so many burning issues facing the country, I am wasting precious newsprint writing about pakodas.
“Before you devoted an entire column to pakodas, you wrote about your son spilling sambar on table cloth, and before that, on how you vomited in Helsinki airport. Mr. Sampath, do you really think we are interested in such details? Do you take us all for pakoda-eating fools?” writes an agitated Mr. Vettippayavenkatachalapathi.
Even before I could recover from this excoriating email, my own father forwarded me an article about India’s top public intellectuals, with a brief covering note shaming me: “As your father, it pains me to observe that not only have you still not made it to the list of India’s top five public intellectuals, you did not even figure in the writer’s supplementary waiting list of upcoming public intellectuals, many of whom are less than half the age mentioned in your fake birth certificate.”
These twin blows had me on my knees. But the straw that broke the back of the camel (that’s me) was a photo of Nirav Modi grinning away with Naomi Watts. It wouldn’t have disturbed me had it been, say, Jennifer Lopez (who has sung about diamonds) or Emily Stone (there is a stone in her name already). But Naomi Watts? She is the public intellectual’s Angelina Jolie. I had a nervous breakdown when I saw that photo.
A friend and ex-colleague who recently achieved all the three milestones necessary to become a public intellectual — a lucrative contract with the government, a stint as a Rajya Sabha MP, and a palatial farmhouse in Chhattarpur — packed me off to a two-day Vipassana boot camp to recover. I am grateful to him, for it helped me discover the diamond in Nirav Modi.
The whole world knows that I am an extremely patriotic person. But there is another, equally important side to my personality: I am also a deeply spiritual person. And the heart of spirituality, as Ravi Shastri once told me, is forgiveness. The British looted us for 250 years. We not only let them leave the country with all their loot, today we happily play cricket with them. I am not suggesting you play cricket with Nirav, Mehul, Lalit or Vijay. But at least applaud our government’s maturity in allowing them to freely leave the country.
I know every one of you is angry with Nirav, and you are not even Punjab National Bank. But trust me, I know how it feels to discover that your TDS has ended up on the ears of Kate Winslet —after all, it’s my TDS too.
Put yourself in Nirav’s shoes for a second. The man was born in a poor family of diamond merchants hailing from a small village in Gujarat called Palanpur. Due to financial pressures, early in life, he was forced to give up his dream of becoming a music conductor and go to Wharton, after which he has dedicated his life to making India proud.
These days, every time I am in New York, Las Vegas, Hong Kong, or London, I shed tears of patriotic joy when I see that the shop selling the most premium designer brand in the most expensive product segment (diamonds) is an Indian one and has ‘Modi’ in its name.
Seeing through diamonds
Thanks to Nirav, Hollywood celebrities who would have difficulty locating India on the map are wearing diamonds designed by an Indian who cut his teeth and diamonds in a tough, Third World city like Mumbai.
As the Vanity Fair put it, “He is a Jain, an ancient minority religion in India whose central tenets include non-violence and a particularly strict form of vegetarianism, and his fate as such was decided by his ancestors nearly 100 years ago.”
Even a totally materialistic Western magazine such as Vanity Fair is able to recognise that Nirav’s fate was sealed nearly 100 years ago. And yet, a nation that is the birthplace of karma is struggling to appreciate Nirav’s sacrifices for his country. No one can attach a price tag to India’s glory. As someone who would do anything to make India’s name shine globally — with or without recourse to diamonds — I wouldn’t begrudge him ₹11,400 crore for getting it done.
As Benjamin Franklin said, the true entrepreneur is one who takes every opportunity that comes his way. Nirav saw that an Indian bank was in LoU with him. And what kind of a man says ‘no’ to LoU?
Incidentally, Nirav also saw what many Indians are too dumb to see: whether as voters, bankers or cricketers, we love a Modi when we see one. And love, as we know, is blind. Not all the diamonds of Nirav Modi can change that about India.
