Ka Ching!

The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey was, well honestly, a good read. It talked about something I could relate to sort of. It talked about banks and how they loan out money to companies and how the companies might not be surviving yet be able to manipulate balance sheets to put up a good show and of course how eventually all of them go down taking the banks down with them.

Interestingly real! Also it talked about how ambitions to the rise of power bite competition away. It talks of two men fighting to the president of a bank when one of them makes a big mistake of a big loan and gets sucked up into it ending in suicide. It beats me how the author makes the reader feel that it’s a mistake right from the beginning while the guy fails to see it himself but how he got so high up the ladder without being able to see such mistakes is an enigma to me! Oh also, the author makes sure the reader always takes one guy’s side. So now you have a good guy and a bad guy. The bad guy commits suicide at the end. The good guy is requested to president and he says ‘Oh I dunno…’. Well that’s end. It would have made a nice read except for…

What is also interesting is the side story of one wanna-be detective security VP of that very bank runs an assignment by sending an ex-employee ex-convict into a network of criminals to find the source of brilliantly counterfeited paper and plastic money, and also by putting in teller lady with brilliant memory and simple mathematical skills into a mediator position between the two because the guy can’t meet the security head but apparently it’s safe for him to meet this lady! And now our man does brilliant work. Of course it doesn’t matter that a certain other ex-convict had failed and ended up dead in a river for a week before the police found him.

But this novice of a man who spent 8months in prison does a brilliant job. Lucky for him his face gets burnt by acid. Lucky for him they let this lady and her baby girl off without killing them. Lucky for him she remembers the directions to this hide out when he was blindfolded in a car. And finally lucky for him she brings in FBI back there and he is saved and bad guys behind bars and our man our lady and little girl go off to California where they start all over again as new people, him with a new face that the bank pays for. Oh did I forget to mention, he didn’t go blind when the acid hit him!

Hmmm… Am I getting too old for this ‘masala ?