In a land where conning and corruption in big money circles raise no eyebrows, it’s hardly a surprise that once gangster stories were exhausted, it was the life of Harshad Mehta, the stock market scamster that caught the fancy of many a filmmaker.

If you were to scan any list of the 10 best OTT watches of the year, figuring on it would be Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story, the watchable 10-episode series on SonyLiv, which de-cluttered his complicated financial chiselling and told his story with detailed simplicity.

It was as if the stars had ordained it when this version, directed by the accomplished Hansal Mehta, got a rousing welcome from professional reviewers and an unprecedented sea of viewers, a rare achievement. It was made rarer when other interpretations of the same story were qualitatively sub-standard. MX Player titled it The Bull Of Dalal Street, called him Harshil Mehra for legality’s sake, and downgraded it to an X-rated series by portraying the notorious bull of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) as a cocaine-snorting womaniser. More smut than scam, from blow jobs in the office, lovemaking against walls and workdesks to positions taken from the Kama Sutra, MX Player’s The Bull… became an extension of its own soft porn series, Mastram.

It elevated Hansal’s Scam that much more as his Harshad was a vegetarian family man who sipped colas, stayed away from coke of the snorting kind, and didn’t go around pawing any woman. His turn-on remained filthy lucre and Hansal focused on telling that story well. His authentic recreation of that era included a gem of a scene featuring the revered cartoonist R.K. Laxman.

Revelling in the applause, Hansal exulted, “I’m experiencing this kind of success after 23 years.” True that, despite the pat for Shahid, the biographical film on lawyer Shahid Azmi assassinated in 2010, and Aligarh, a gritty real story, this time on Prof. Shrinivas Siras who was hounded by Aligarh Muslim University for his sexual orientation, success eluded Hansal. Even when he did a mainstream film, the controversy-fuelled Simran, it didn’t work.

He nodded, “The reception to Scam is a different kind of appreciation, there’s acceptance by a larger audience.”

Sometimes the whole universe conspires to get it right for you and that’s what happened to Hansal’s Harshad. “Everything was in tune,” he cheerfully said, “like a guitar where all the strings are so nicely tuned that the music sounds good.”

It’s an awful observation, but even the pandemic helped put focus on Scam. A project signed three years ago with Sameer Nair of Applause Entertainment, it just happened to be ready this October. Hansal happened to finish shooting on March 5, three weeks before the lockdown. “At that time, none of us realised the severity of the coronavirus and tended to trivialise it. Within three weeks, the world changed.”

Another stroke of luck that “happened” was the perfect casting of a little-known Gujarati actor, Pratik Gandhi, in the vital role of Harshad Mehta. “Pratik was my first choice and, fortunately, my producers didn’t resist it. They gave us the freedom to cast authentically. A lot of the success is due to the faith Sameer Nair put in me and in Pratik.”

Luck factor again. “A lot of OTT platforms demand a big star. But Scam was fortunately an independent production... The temptation to cast a star is always there,” he accepted. But despite some of his own team members urging him to sign on a major name, he resisted and won.

As we step into a new year, another rendering of the same story is ready. Abhishek Bachchan as The Big Bull, a film produced by Juhu neighbour Ajay Devgn, bowed to pandemic laws and opted for a release on Disney+ Hotstar. Harshad Mehta died ignominiously exactly 19 years ago on December 31. Let’s see how he lives on in Bachchan’s version of the bull who forced a change in the rules of the BSE.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author