Maverick Commissioner by Boria Majumdar

Author:Boria Majumdar [Majumdar, Boria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789392099052
Publisher: SimonSchuster
Published: 2022-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

ALWAYS A MAVERICK

Capitol Cinema in Nainital is just another standalone movie theatre of old. Or may be not if you are a fan of Indian cricket. In 1980, a psychological thriller called Red Rose starring Rajesh Khanna and Poonam Dhillon was released and a 17-year-old student of St Joseph’s College along with his three friends went to watch the movie. Nothing wrong really to do so but in a strict boarding school with dreadful ‘Fathers’ and ‘Brothers’, a lie that he was going to watch a football match and that too in a small town couldn’t have been kept under wraps for a long time. But then he was a maverick and a cavalier from the beginning. He would always try to redefine the contours of what was permissible and what was not. There is a “line” that normally people don’t like to cross in life and if one looks at Lalit Modi’s entire journey, his starting point, it wouldn’t be wrong to say was that particular “line”.

The rich and spoilt brat that Modi allegedly was for many, scion of the illustrious Modi family, grandson of business tycoon of the license raj era, Rai Bahadur Gujarmal Modi and son of Krishan Kumar Modi, he wasn’t exactly repentant for his act of truancy. It was Brother C.G. Fernandez, the principal of St Joseph’s School, who decided to expel the teenager but allowed him to take his board exams. Not exactly blessed with an academic bent of mind, what ran in Modi’s blood was a sharp business acumen even when he was in school.

There are stories of how he would discuss the idea of having Hollywood films dubbed in Hindi and releasing them for the Indian market back then. These ideas germinated in his mind way back in the early 1980s but eventually happened in India in the 90s when the cable and satellite TV revolution took over the nation’s cultural space. More on that later but one must decode a young Modi to understand what shaped one of the greatest game-changers in Indian sport, whose career was living and dying by the sword.

Born as second child to Krishan Kumar and Bina on 29 November 1963, Lalit as he once told a leading national broadcaster in an interview, was born with not a golden but a diamond spoon. He was sent for higher studies to the United States by his father Krishan Kumar, the supremo of the Modi Empire. He studied for a couple of years at New York’s Pace University and then moved to Duke University in North Carolina.

These are premier colleges where rich Indians with deep pockets in the pre-economic liberalisation era sent their kids for a foreign degree. While Modi’s stint at Pace was an uneventful two years, it was at North Carolina that he had his first brush with the wrong side of the law. Modi was a hardcore party animal, glimpses of which were evident when IPL, in its initial years, gained notoriety for those after-match parties, which have since been officially banned by the BCCI.

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