Don't Tell the Governor Written by Ravi Subramanian

Don't Tell The Governor by Ravi Subramanian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author is a well known star writer from South India, also known as John Grisham of India, who spent most of his professional life in senior positions of Indian national banks, after his management degree from IIM, Bangalore. His previous books have National award winning status. His fans and film producers eagerly wait for his next creation always.

Storyline:

India would never forget 08th Nov,2016, when its iconic Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetization of Rs.1000 and Rs.500 notes with immediate effect on his address to the nation on television. This book’s storyline revolves around this daring incident, fictionalized in the author’s style.

The much flaunted Reserve Bank of India’s Governor Aditya Kesavan, brought in as a replacement to the earlier Governor, handpicked by the Prime Minister of India, gets involved in a secret love affair with Pallavi Soni, a model cum not so successful film actress married to an ambitious businessman, Vicky Malhotra. It all starts well when Vicky starts some ambitious projects in India like an online E-Commerce portal, a stake in one of the star teams in IPL Cricket, and Suyog Monthly Gold Scheme. He befriends Aditya in one of the company’s high level parties which leads to Pallavi getting physically attracted to Aditya and later falling in love with him. All goes well until all of Vicky’s businesses crumble, due to lack of customer patronization and change in Government policies. Vicky abandons Pallavi, when it was found that Indian Government was about to arrest Vicky for huge bank defaults. This is when Aditya comes to the rescue of Pallavi for the repayment of the 300 crores, due to the banks, by using his power as an RBI Governor. He diverts that amount secretly from the amount paid by the Government to a terrorist organization of Pakistan to get hostages released from an Indian Airlines hijack event. The story ends with a bang when the Prime Minister announces demonetization of high denomination currency one day suddenly, thus invalidating all the money siphoned off by Aditya as well as that paid to the terrorists. Aditya is caught off hook when the PM forces or rather blackmails him to approve this demonetization as an RBI Governor in return to squash his theft charges on him.

Many other characters like Dhanish Khosla, who works as a lobbyist, under cover for the PM to unearth such secret deals in his Government, Mehul Modi, who escaped the country after defaulting more than Rs.5000 crores to the banks, De La Spire, a Swiss company which supplies currency paper to print Indian currency have been juxtaposed to create some spice in the story. The overall experience of the much talked about demonetization is rolled into an interesting story covering many recent events that stormed the headlines of press /media but forgotten by the people of the country.

Pros : The author very tactically put forward how Government of India manipulates the so-called autonomous apex body Reserve Bank of India to fund the former’s financial emergencies, just like a fly in the bottle. Also, one gets to know how the terrorist organizations in Pakistan are being funded through fake Indian currency for infiltration as well as destabilizing the economy. The book has hair raising twists and turns. The author links different events in the end with proper justification for every wrong action. He once again proves the fact that the wrong doers cannot get away forever but one day will be brought to justice either by God or fate. The famous saying “Never Sleep with Someone whose troubles are more than yours” is quite relevant to Aditya’s sexual perversion towards Pallavi that ultimately led to his professional as well as moral downfall. I bet that this book if made into a film would fetch huge profits to the Bollywood industry.

Cons: There are some open ends left in the story when it comes to Vicky and Mehul that ran away with huge money defaulted from the banks. Maybe, its because similar situation are still unsolved, in the current scenario of such real life characters in recent Indian financial scandals. The Indian monetary policy and loopholes in the banking industry are shown to be quite weak and prone to easy money laundering by clever businessmen, which might not be very true always.

My rating is 4 out of 5


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