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All the world loves a winner and if that winner happened to have hit a jackpot, there's all the more reason to love him. When news came in earlier this year that a little known entrepreneur, Kola Venkat Krishna Mohan, from Vijayawada had actually won the first prize at the Euro lottery, the chattering classes fed on it for days. TV crews were rushed to his door and newspapers carried human interest features about how the gentleman was coping with his new-found celebrity status. After all, Rs 84 crore was not to be sneezed at and anyone who looked as if he was going to be in imminent possession of such a sum was bound to get catapulted to celebrity status in these sensex-obsessed times.
Just as pride comes before a fall, euphoria often precedes disillusionment and doubt. And there is certainly a cloud of doubt looming large over the said Mohan who is, at the moment, a missing Mohan to boot. The enigmatic and sudden absence of the erstwhile jackpot winner a few weeks ago has led to a whole host ofuncomfortable questions being raised about the veracity of the jackpot story, especially since the man seems to have utilised news of his lottery win very creatively to rustle up loans worth Rs 10 crore from individuals and institutions.
While ordinary people may be forgiven for their foolishness in allowing themselves to be blinded by the Mohan myth, overawed as they presumably were by the sheer immensity of his good fortune, when Andhra Pradesh's ruling party, the Telugu Desam Party, behaves in a similar fashion it only exposes its political naivete and moral bankruptcy. Not only was Mohan accepted into the party as an active party member in the presence of Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu no less, not only did the party calmly pocket the Rs 10 lakh he had generously offered it by way of a donation, he almost got himself a party ticket to contest a Lok Sabha seat from Machilipatnam in the last General Election. TDP's political opponents are now, not entirely surprisingly, using this embarrassingdevelopment to expose the party's `easy rider' brand of politics.
The most conspicuous aspect of this episode is the fact that nobody, but nobody, found it necessary to check if the man had indeed won that wretched jackpot. Media attention and the sheer size of the jackpot seem to have dazzled all and sundry. Wealth, in any case, has come to command an inordinate sense of social respect, with men like stock market manipulator Harshad Mehta getting the adulation normally reserved for film stars and politicians. His portly form even made it to Ganapati pandals in Mumbai in those heady days of the early '90s.
While the TDP wrestles with the guilt of having become so quickly bedazzled by a man who supposedly had Rs 84 crore in his wallet, the Mohan story should also come as a timely cautionary tale for the general public.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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