South Asia Daily

Fermilab may have found a possible fifth force of nature

Mayank Chhaya at the Fermilab in Batavia, near Chicago. (Photo: MC)*

It is time for me to visit the iconic Fermilab in Batavia again. This time to understand whether and how scientists there have found a new force of nature, a fifth force apart from the other four known fundamental ones so far. They are gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. I know that “strong force” and “weak force” do not sound particularly exciting or convincing but trust me they exist and are all key to what the universe is.

The last time I visited the Fermilab was in September 2016 to interview a young scientist about Dark Matter which too seems as illusive as this new force. Like the great Albert Einstein said everything about the universe at its operational level subtle. The unfathomable spectacle called the universe that we see stems from aching subtlety as constituted by a variety of particles.

Speaking of particles, there is one called muons. Those are the particles at the heart of the announcement by the Fermilab of what could well be a fifth fundamental force of nature.

“The long-awaited first results from the Muon g-2 (expressed as g minus 2) experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory show fundamental particles called muons behaving in a way that is not predicted by scientists’ best theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. This landmark result, made with unprecedented precision, confirms a discrepancy that has been gnawing at researchers for decades,” the Fermilab said in an announcement.

“The strong evidence that muons deviate from the Standard Model calculation might hint at exciting new physics. Muons act as a window into the subatomic world and could be interacting with yet undiscovered particles or forces,” the laboratory said.

If the fifth force is indeed confirmed with the finality of all the scientific weight, then as the lab says we are entering the era of a new physics. I am quoting directly from the press release because it explains in great detail what the likely breakthrough means.

“A muon is about 200 times as massive as its cousin, the electron. Muons occur naturally when cosmic rays strike Earth’s atmosphere, and particle accelerators at Fermilab can produce them in large numbers. Like electrons, muons act as if they have a tiny internal magnet. In a strong magnetic field, the direction of the muon’s magnet precesses, or wobbles, much like the axis of a spinning top or gyroscope. The strength of the internal magnet determines the rate that the muon precesses in an external magnetic field and is described by a number that physicists call the g-factor. This number can be calculated with ultra-high precision.

As the muons circulate in the Muon g-2 magnet, they also interact with a quantum foam of subatomic particles popping in and out of existence. Interactions with these short-lived particles affect the value of the g-factor, causing the muons’ precession to speed up or slow down very slightly. The Standard Model predicts this so-called anomalous magnetic moment extremely precisely. But if the quantum foam contains additional forces or particles not accounted for by the Standard Model, that would tweak the muon g-factor further,” it says.

I know the following is very difficult to grasp but this the crux of the possible discovery.

The accepted theoretical values for the muon are:

g-factor: 2.00233183620(86)

anomalous magnetic moment: 0.00116591810(43)

[uncertainty in parentheses]

 

The new experimental world-average results announced by the Muon g-2 collaboration today are:

g-factor: 2.00233184122(82)

anomalous magnetic moment: 0.00116592061(41)

These results have been given a significance of 4.2 sigma, sigma being the scale by which potential discoveries are graded. 5 sigma is the gold standard by which 4.2 is not bad at all but still not absolute proof of a fifth force. Like I said at that level of physics everything just too subtle and hence illusive.

It is possible that this result could well establish a fifth fundamental force of nature.

I intend to do a story on this from my just inaugurated show ‘Mayank Chhaya Reports’. I will do an initial story this Saturday on my Facebook and YouTube pages.

*I have used my photograph at the Fermilab from 2016 wholly unnecessarily.

Some quick observations about Dileesh Pothan’s ‘Joji’

Kuttappan, played with coiled up menace by P.N. Sunny.

Dileesh Pothan’s ‘Joji’ is a highly accomplished, subtly polished even if rather spare and austere film. It is one of the best films that I have seen in recent years that apart from everything else lives up to the idea of cinema or as the word’s Greek root, kinemat, means—movement.

Cinematographer Shyju Khalid’s filming is as important a part of the movie as its superbly etched out characters.

‘Joji’ is an Indian derivative of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. I have read the Bard of Avon in fits and starts. I have not read any play by him fully because I am not much of a reader of plays. I have read enough to know why he has the astonishingly enduring appeal that he has now had for some four centuries.

The well-known Indian psychologist and social theorist Ashis Nandy famous said “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.” I would paraphrase is to say “Shakespeare was an Indian accidentally born in England.” That is if you read the kind of familial intrigues that characterize so much of his writing.

‘Joji’s Macbethian traits lend themselves so well to a Kerala Christian family, the Panachel family, lorded over by the cruel patriarch Kuttappan, played with coiled up menace by P.N. Sunny. In an early display of his cruelty Kuttappan has a scene where he tells his youngest son, the namesake Joji played rivetingly by Fahadh Faasil, "....or else I will break your spine and feed you for the rest of your life." That is as inventive a threat as it can get.

I would not like to go into the whole story because a) It is too much work for me and b) It is too much work for me. But it is enough to say that the Panachels are as splintered by their greed as they are united by it.

There is much to watch in this unflagging work by Pothan so powerfully aided by Khalid’s camerawork and sharp scripting by Syam Pushkaran. All performances are in perfect sync and extraordinary without actorly egos tripping over one another.

P.N. Sunny and Fahadh Faasil

After a very long time, while watching an Indian film I felt I was actually watching cinema and not loud radio plays.  That is where I would like to specially acknowledge Khalid’s camerawork which is remarkable without trying hard to be remarkable. It is not showy but telling without much effort. I am sure a great deal went into creating the uncluttered look in a state which is so spectacularly lovely.

There are some evocative high angle shots about which I wondered whether they were taken in a helicopter or using a drone. Quite cheekily as I wondered that a high angle frame came up with an actual toy drone in it.

On an unrelated matter, I struggle to think if there has been a Hindi movie out of Mumbai of this sharply measured brilliance as ‘Joji’. I don’t think so.

Unobtrusively observing Nature

I have long been an unobtrusive observer of unfolding Nature. To that extent that we all are part of and intrinsic to Nature, one can never be just pure observer. One is unintentionally and ever so gently collapsing wave functions all the time. Our reality is wave functions that we collapsed by observing it.

I am well aware that wave function is a function of the quantum world which does not work at the macro level that we operate on but I have long hypothesized that in relation to the scale of the universe us, the sentient world, could be considered a quantum world. Now please don’t ask me how one quantum particle, namely I, collapse the wave function of a sparrow, another quantum particle. I do not know the answer to that. Yet.

This morning I caught a sparrow, which seemed to be building a nest under my apartment’s electric meter, perched on a trellis. Sparrows, like pigeons and crows, are quite accustomed to humans and they do not startle easily. That I was barely a couple of feet away from the trellis observing it did not seem to bother the bird. In fact, it did seem to look right back at me. (See the photo).

While watching the sparrow it struck me, again, how non-human sentient life, fits so well out in the open. They have the knack to make their surroundings pleasant and familiar no matter where they might be. I looked at the sparrow and thought to myself, “Well, look at that. That is where it should be perched.” Non-human sentient life never looks out of place no matter where they are. That is a remarkable thing.

Looking at the sparrow sit meditatively the following two verses formed themselves:

कहीं भी बैठ ले ओ गौरैया

वोह तेरा ही घर है

तेरे पैरों तले धरती

और आसमाँ ऊपर है

--मयंक छाया

A short one about the Maldives and Mumbai celebrities

Rising sea levels caused by global warming may or may not yet sink the Maldives but the weight of Mumbai celebrities who visit it in a revolving door selfie-fest most likely will. Every other day a Mumbai movie star lands on the island in hunt for a yet un-Instagramed (not a word but coined here) corner, drops down to the bare minimum by the spectacularly turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean and gets selfied.

As perhaps the first Indian journalist who extensively reported the threats to the Maldives of submergence under sea water in 1990, I sometimes feel delusionally proprietorial about the islands. I have zero reason to feel that way but I do feel that.

That year I traveled as part of the press corps accompanying then Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh. Journalists were accommodated in a high-end beachside resort on Bandos if memory serves. I remember the first night on the resort after the day’s reporting, lazing by the ocean under a breathtaking sky of the kind I had never seen before. It was deep dark blue sequined with stars which seemed so unreal that for a moment I thought I was inside a planetarium. For about an hour I did absolutely nothing other than staring at the Indian Ocean’s sharply defined horizon slicing the sky in the distance.

The next day I went to the office of the island's environment ministry in the capital Male' because one of the officials had told me about the existential threat posed by the rising sea level. My fellow journalists were not particularly interested in the story. They were more interested in shopping which in those days of  a pre-economic liberalization India was quite an attraction. Male' had shops that carried “foreign” goods.

The prediction by environmental officials of the Maldives government then was dire. As I look over three-decades back it is heartening that the island nation has not yet gone under. That is where I fear that the weight of all manners of Mumbai celebrities might speed up that process even without most of their clothes.

The Maldives sure does not mind celebrity visits because they bring in tourism revenues. They might as well make the most of its pristine beaches until such time as they sink, if they sink.

Shakespeare, Moon, Suez Canal and the Ever Given

Reading the news about gigantic cargo ship Ever Given, which ran aground in the Suez Canal and stayed stuck there for nearly a week, now having reflated, I was reminded of this famous line from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar.’ Lest you think that I am scholar of Shakespeare, let me just say that I am not at all one. I have read him only in fits and starts and never fully.

The line is, “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Essentially, it means one must grab an opportunity when it arises because one never knows when one might ever get another. It has to do with how ships use high tides to enter a port or leave it.

That is precisely what happened as the full Moon, which was in fact a supermoon last night, caused the Suez Canal water to rise because of high tides helping the Ever Given refloat. Think about this. The gravitational pull of a moon, in this case the Moon, orbiting around us at roughly 238,900 miles causes the oceans to rise which in turns swells up the canal water which in turn helps free the cargo ship.

I can already hear astrologers saying “we told you so” about their rather ludicrous claim that planets control and rule individual lives. Sure, in the broadest sense of the word part of why Earth is hospitable to life generally has to do with its position within the solar system and how the other planets might have shaped some of the way sentient life evolved here but the notion that Mercury in retrograde will somehow determine my specific life is not worthy of comment.

Speaking of stars and us or, to be more accurate, planets and us there is another iconic line by Shakespeare that also happens to be Julius Caesar. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Indeed.

Bangladesh and I

No, I was not imprisoned in 1971 in the run-up to the creation of Bangladesh. Also, I did not engage in Satyagraha either because there was no Satyagraha in Ahmedabad for a non-existent nation yet. Satyagraha was born in Ahmedabad as a form of protest courtesy of a certain Mohandasbhai sometime in 1917. I was also born in Ahmedabad in 1961. So I was only about 10 at the time of the war that led to the creation of a whole new nation courtesy of a certain Indiraben.

My point is it is natural to want to be a part of history-changing events such as the creation of Bangladesh, which was today, 50 years ago. One cannot fault India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be a part of that history if only to burnish his current image. One only expects accuracy. For instance, he had to be either 20 or 22 years old. he could not have been not both. Maybe he spoke colloquially as they do in that part of the world; "Main kuchh bees-baais saal ka hunga" sort of thing. 

The 1971 war unfolded between March 25 and ended on December 16, 1971 when what is now Pakistan (it was West Pakistan then) surrendered to the Indian army on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s watch.

It is possible that Prime Minister Modi did take part in some kind of support movement during the war. But the idea that he was 20-22, as he said during his visit to Bangladesh, is a bit suspect because he would have been 22 in 1972 after Bangladesh was already born. Perhaps he meant 20. He could not be both. His birth date is not iffy. It is clear that he was born on September 17, 1950.

For instance, I know I was 10 years and four months old when the war began. I am also certain that Bangladesh was born 21 days before I turned 11. I also know that the windowpanes our house had to be either painted black or covered with newspapers in order that prospective Pakistani fighter jets did not bomb us. Gujarat is a state bordering Pakistan and Ahmedabad being the state’s biggest city there were apprehensions of such an eventuality occurring. I remember sirens going off which had the opposite effect of making us rush out to be part of the excitement of war.

If I were prime minister today and were in Bangladesh as part of the 50^th year independence celebration I would not be able to credibly claim that as a 10-12-year-old boy I offered Satyagraha on which I had a special claim hailing from Ahmedabad. Maybe the prime minister can claim that since he was 10-12 years older than me.

My linguistic promiscuity

I wrote the following post on March 7, 2014. It still works.

March 7, 2014

I often wonder whether I have a natural language; natural to the extent that anyone can have one. After all, language is acquired and is not innate.

My first acquired language was Gujarati. That was the language of all existential references but before I could graduate to its mature expression I switched to English for professional/survival reasons. I had never conversed in English till I turned 20 which was also the age when I started writing it as a means of earning.

It is my distinct memory that in those days my thought process was a sort of parallel processing in two languages—Gujarati and English. I never translated one to the other in my mind. They both blossomed on their own. All this while, a mixture of Hindi/Urdu had already become a third track from my early teens because of my natural affinity for poetry. As far as I can tell Hindi/Urdu too were getting fine-tuned in some corner of my brain simultaneously but independently. I am not going to include the other two languages that I understand very well—Marathi and Punjabi.

After living with four (actually six) languages for the better part of the last nearly four decades I could not say with any degree of certainty which is my default language. Purely in terms of the frequency of use, English wins hands down as the likeliest default language. The reasons for that are obvious because it is as much a language of survival as it is of predominant communication. However, if the ease of cursing is used as the yardstick to measure my linguistic proficiency, then I would say it is a close contest between English and Hindi/Gujarati. I would define your natural language as one in which you would curse severely under your breath.

I feel linguistically promiscuous. The brain often indulges in verbal orgies of threesomes or foursomes or even sixsomes between these languages. Marathi and Punjabi remain only reluctant participants in these acts but they are there, hovering around.

These thoughts came to me this morning for no apparent reason. It would be interesting to see which language I might die in. One cannot foreshadow the circumstances of one’s death but I am curious to find out which language I might be thinking in when the end comes in whatever form it does. It is possible that I may have a reflective death where as I am fading away I am actually reflecting on this, that and the other in a particular language as opposed to an unexpected end where I have no control on such details.

I am at a stage where it is no longer possible to say which is really the language of my thoughts, the process of thinking. One wakes up with any of these six languages and goes to sleep with any of them. My monolingual American friends freak out when I discuss this with them. Many of them are unable to process a creature with so many languages rattling about in his brain. I compound it by saying that there are hundreds of millions of people in India and elsewhere in Asia and Europe who speak/understand/write more than three languages without consciously trying.

As one friend put it so eloquently sometime ago while discussing this at a Thanksgiving dinner, “Get the fuck outta here.” Of course, he did not mean for me to really get the fuck outta there but it was his way of expressing bewilderment at the idea that people could be proficient in many languages simultaneously.

Poetry is an unnecessary art

Yesterday was World Storytelling Day. Today is World Poetry Day as declared by the United Nations. So after you tell a story, recite a poem.

I have nearly a lifelong association with poetry. It is only fair that I get to hold forth a bit on the subject.

I have described poetry as an unnecessary art. Let me, in the gloriously self-absorbed tradition of South Asian poets, quote myself. On September 15, 2014, I wrote, “Unlike prose, which is necessarily time-intensive, poetry, unless it is epic, is more often than not instantaneous. That is because it often results from an evanescent inspiration. It has to be captured in that moment otherwise it comes across manufactured or contrived. I have always considered poetry to be, apart from being an unnecessary talent, an affliction. It results from a massive chemical disturbance inside one’s brain. It has to be expressed as soon as it occurs even if it happens to be rough and raw. For accomplished poets, who have been doing it for a long time, it takes birth fully formed and polished.”

The same year on April 20, I said this: “Poetry is an unnecessary talent. Having written it since 13, I think I have earned the right to say this. That said, not all talents should be judged for their worldly utility. The real worth of poetry lies in its inspirational quotient.

I have not done a scientific study to say this but I am fairly certain that great poetry has inspired people to do great things. The poet is necessarily is an inspirer or an illuminator. Poetry is a catalyst. If a single poetic line inspires people with genuine utility-oriented talents to do great things that help humanity at large, then poetry serves its purpose as does the poet. However, it is not the poet’s business to do things. Poets lead a life of conceit where doing worldly/mundane/utilitarian things is anathema.”

For someone who writes a verse or two or a dozen perhaps every other day, today bears no particular significance. Poetry is not seasonal or a passing observance. It is a way of life just as painting or prose is. For instance, unaware that today is World Poetry Day, I was woken up around 2.17 a.m. (I always look at the clock when I wake up) by this verse in Hindi.

मर्ज़ अगर दिल का हो तो

इलाज दिमाग़ का कराना चाहिए

(Marz agar dil ka ho to

Ilaj dimagh ka karana chahiye)

Loosely translates as:

If your heart is afflicted (as in love)

You should treat your head

The idea of the verse being that if you fall in love, there is an element of insanity to it.

My point is for me everyday is a poetry day.

World Storytelling Day and I

Today is supposed to be World Storytelling Day. As someone who began telling extempore, made-on-the-spot stories from the age of nine, I did not need a special day to tell stories. Many of those who grew up with me will bear me out when I say this.

From about age nine right until sixteen gathering neighborhood children and often even adults and telling them stories was my thing. My stories featured my own characters and versions of Phantom and Mandrake. Those were free-flowing sessions and stories which had clearly delineated heroes and villains although occasionally I blurred the lines so much as to make them indistinguishable.

Performing came naturally to me and stage fright was not something I even remotely understood. A complete lack of inhibition was an inheritance from my mother. In a span of seven years, I must have spun a few hundred yarns. I suppose it was a measure of how well I told them that the listeners ranged from those my age and in their 20s right up to 50s. It is conceivable that initially it was perhaps the cuteness of a nine-year-old acting out his plots that made my stories passable but as I grew older, I had to make sure that they were genuinely so.

Eventually word reached my school about my storytelling. That meant every time a teacher did not show up for whatever reason in whichever grade, I used to be called to hold forth hold class even if it meant I had to let go of my own. Like I said stage fright was utterly alien to me. There was nothing to getting on stage or in front of people. You just rise and do it.

It is not my case at all that every story I told was engaging but it is certainly my claim that a reasonable number of them was. If only some of those were recorded or written down I may have been sitting on a tidy collection.

I remember the one about Phantom and Dara Singh joining hands to take on a bunch of vicious thugs. Mandrake would come in as and when needed to help them. The only problem was that they did not speak each other’s language. So they spoke in Gujarati with some amount of Hindi and English thrown in.

On World Storytelling Day, it is just another day for me.

Re-revisiting The Big Bull

 

On the heels of director Hansal Mehta’s critically acclaimed web series ‘Scam 1992’ about the once flashy, brash, flamboyant, then disgraced and incarcerated and eventually dead stockbroker Harshad ‘Big Bull’ Mehta, comes a feature length movie clearly inspired his life.

The movie is called ‘The Big Bull’ featuring Abhishek Bachchan in the titular role and is directed by Kookie Gulati.

I had written the following to coincide with the web series and I might as well republish it to time it with the movie’s release.

I am reminded of my meeting with Harshad Mehta sometime in 1989-90.

“What you call crooked, saheb,” said Harshad Mehta to me, “is actually pure street smarts.” And then the stockbroker smiled as if particularly pleased at what he was about to say and how he had set up that punchline, “Or shall I say Dalal Street smarts?”

That was sometime in 1989-90 when I met the Bombay stockbroker, who took India’s stock market on a dizzying rollercoaster ride that eventually ended in his incarceration and death in jail due to heart attack on December 31, 2001. That is apart from a loss in hundreds of millions of rupees to various financial institutions, many of whose bosses were complicit in the scam which was at once ingenious and yet quite ordinary.  The meeting took place in Mehta’s sprawling 15,000 square feet apartment on Bombay’s Worli Seaface. I noticed before going up to his apartment that his black Lexus was parked at a strategic spot where it could be seen prominently.

Remember those were still the pre-economic liberalization days and owning a Lexus, which reputedly cost him 4.7 million rupees then, was the pinnacle of luxury for the emerging nouveau riche like Mehta then. He made no apology about his wealth,

By the time I met Mehta had already been a darling of the business media that lapped up his every move as brilliant. That he sounded so self-assured in a brass-knuckle sort of way and dressed well in the late 1980s-early 1990s style coupled with his ability to project bragging dressed up as insights worked wonders with the generally unsuspecting business media.

My impression of Mehta from some three decades ago was that of someone who was driven by an unusual ambition to break into what he considered Bombay’s corporate elite in defiance of his own rise from a lower middle class Gujarati family. He seemed to think it was his manifest destiny to be both very wealthy and very successful. At the same time though, in a streak somewhat reminiscent of Dhirubhai Ambani, small associations seemed to give him particular joy. For instance, I also remember that his face brightened up when he found out that my family too was from Rajkot in Saurashtra where he was born. Dhirubhai had a similar reaction when he came to know that I too was from Saurashtra like him.

Speaking of manifest destiny, it often came out in the form of his aphorisms such as “I don’t create waves, I ride them.” In an era well before the internet, mobile phones and, of course, social media Mehta had figured out a way to make his presence felt. At one point in his conversation with me he got up to face his glass window facing the Arabian Sea, somewhat reminiscent of the scene from Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘Deewar’, and said to me in Gujarati, “Vat thi kamayo chhun. (I have earned it with confidence.) Vat in today’s parlance would be swag. “Aa dariyo dekhay chhe ne samey, that’s me. I will always be around.” (You see the sea from here, that’s me),” he declared so effortlessly that one might have suspected he had practiced those lines. He had not. During my interaction as well as his interactions with the media then, those lines came to him easy.

The purpose of this short post is not to dwell on all the complex ways in which Mehta gamed the subterranean criminal impulses within the leaderships of the Indian banking system and other financial institutions. Let me just say that he hit upon a few ingenious ways to exploit the system. He used banks’ money to play the share market by promising them high interest rates. In return, he would have the banks transfer money into his personal account. The ploy would be to buy securities from other banks.

Another way was to leverage the bank receipt or BR. The BR was a way in which the seller of government securities gave the buyer of those a BR rather than the actual transfer of the securities. Mehta’s criminal enterprise was to find pliable banks which would agree to issue fake BRs. He was said to have found a couple of small cooperative banks to do that for him for a consideration under the table for its managers. He then used those fake BRs to raise actual money from established banks. The sums were huge and at its height the scandal was supposed to be to the tune of sixty billion rupees.

One of the constant refrains that Mehta had after his life as a stockbroker began to unravel in the face of what was clearly criminal manipulation of the Bombay stock market by him and those close to him was to insist that had the system let him play he would have ensured that everyone made money. Clearly, that was an empty boast.

I remember him making another extravagant claim. He used to boast that if the rupee was made convertible he could bring in $3 billion in investment on his own strength alone. I had asked him about that to which he said rather cavalierly, “As long as no one stands in my way, I can deliver that.”

Mehta had a weird sense of self-assurance about him. In his mind he had absolutely no sense of having done anything wrong at all. It was that delusion that prompted him to make a stunning claim in 1993, by which time I had already shifted to New Delhi. On June 16, 1993 he claimed publicly that he had paid India’s Prime Minister P V Narsimha Rao Rs 10 million (one crore) to get him off the hook in the huge stock-banking scandal.

There was a time when Mehta’s personal portfolio was worth twenty billion rupees. He would write personal checks of five billion rupees to the State Bank of India and two billion rupees to the Bombay Stock Exchange to cover his stock purchases. In keeping with his panache to gain public attention he paid 260 million rupees in personal income tax in March 1993, making him India’s highest individual taxpayer then.

It was in April, 1992 when journalist Sucheta Dalal exposed Mehta’s racket bringing his life crashing down. I vividly remember a photograph of Mehta looking disheveled and holding a plastic bag coming out of a police van. He looked clearly beaten down. He was banished from trading but continued to giving stock market tips. He was convicted in September, 1999. About two years later he died of a heart attack while being in criminal custody in the Thane prison.  He was 47.

Bombay’s stockbrokers, a vast majority of whom was and still is Gujaratis, treated Mehta as a folk hero for quite some time. Many of them called him the “Amitabh Bachchan” of the stock market, a sobriquet he was not particularly enamored of as far as I can tell. “I deal with real hard world, not a fictional one,” he told me.

My enduring image of Harshad Mehta, who was clearly devoid of any scruples and was perhaps even a sociopath, was him standing by his sea-facing apartment window in a ballooning white executive shirt, specially tailored trousers and a paisley patterned yellow tie. “I always wear a suit and tie. It gives you confidence,” he said.

One typically Harshad Mehta claim that he made after being convicted was that he would have paid back every single penny to anyone he owed were he allowed to operate in his own unfettered ways. He clearly had the mind of an autocrat.