So, Raj Rajaratnam, a Tamil-speaking immigrant from Sri Lanka, now faces up to 11 years in prison.
The multi-million dollar insider trading scam that Rajaratnam engineered is yet another, and latest, evidence that Indians and South Asians have truly integrated into most aspects of the American mainstream!
With a personal wealth that was once estimated at nearly $2 billion before his arrest and conviction, Rajaratnam was one of the richest people on the planet, and was a success story from the island of Sri Lanka to the island of Manhattan. However, like the movie character Gordon Gekko who uttered that immortal cinematic line “greed is good,” Rajaratnam too engaged in insider trading to transform his hedge fund, Galleon Group, into one of the best performers.
He managed to successfully lure many others who had access to valuable inside information, but whose depositions in court sealed the fate of this once high-flying Wall Street tycoon. A high profile figure in this illustrious rap sheet of co-conspirators was Rajat Gupta, the former chief executive of the global management consulting firm, McKinsey. Gupta, who was born in India, was one among many other Indian-Americans in the Rajaratnam case—the “Indian mafia,” as they were apparently fondly referred to in their wildly successful days before they fell victims to greed of the illegal kind.
In yet another interesting twist to this immigrant story, the lead prosecutor in the case is of Indian origins as well. The US Attorney in-charge of the prosecution, Preet Bharara, grew up in the US after his parents emigrated from the northern Indian state of Punjab—diagonally and far away from Rajaratnam’s Sri Lanka. Bharara, represents the Indian-American stories that draw the envy of many, with an undergraduate at Harvard, followed by law degree from Columbia and a successful professional life since.
Thus, it was an all South Asian immigrant affair in the Manhattan courtroom. Talk about “all in the family!”
Such white collar crime, is, however, not anything new in our old countries in South Asia. Corporate and political crimes are everyday events there, and often these two twines intersect too.
The latest of the large-scale scandals to rock India, for instance, resulted in huge giveaways to the country’s telecommunication businesses at an estimated cost of more than $40 billion of lost revenue to the Indian government. Forty billion dollars might seem like small change to us here against the background of trillions of dollars of debt over which Washington is now deadlocked. In India, which is by no means a rich country, $40 billion is only a hair more than its annual defense expenditure!
Old habits die hard, particularly here in the US where immigrant groups engaging in crime is a story that has been re-enacted many times over by those chasing a shorter path to the American Dream. Rajaratnam and his “Indian Mafia” are the latest installment and certainly will not be the last. In this particular case, we can then maybe adapt the famous line from The Godfather, to "drop the gun, take the jilebi."
In a way, Rajaratnam’s shady and illegal wheeling and dealing has helped convey to the rest of America that as much as we have spellers and scientists amongst us, Indian-Americans are also regular people who run convenience stores or occasionally indulge in crime.
To paraphrase, a tad, Shakespeare’s Shylock--who too was overcome by greed--we bleed when pricked, laugh when tickled, and get jailed when caught! Oh well! I suppose Rajaratnam will now have all the time to catch up on Shakespearean and contemporary literature!
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