The Adani “fraud” has too many zeros for the aam Indian to wrap his or her head around. In a litany of impenetrable word arrangements such as “FPO”, “DRI”, “EBITDA”, “LAS position” etc., the only recognisable and, therefore, heebie-jeebies-inducing arrangements are “SBI” and “LIC”. The aam Indian may not be able to tell Hindenburg from an iceberg, may even believe Adani and Ambani to be the fraternal twins they are not, but he knows this for sure — nothing will happen to whoever has been guilty of any kind of thievery.

Join the club

Now, had Dante been living — and Indian — and updating his Divine Comedy, he would have a large cast of characters to play with. In Inferno, which is the first section of the Divine Comedy, Dante puts thieves deep inside Hell --- in the Malbowges or the Eighth Circle. They are placed well below lust, gluttony, wrath and even violence. Every circle has bowges or trenches. Grafters are in the fifth bowge, thieves in the seventh, fraudsters and counterfeiters in the eighth and tenth bowges, respectively. Adani, the Kochars, Vijay Mallya, Chitra Ramkrishna, Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, Rana Kapoor, who he’d assign to which bowge is for you to guess. If you recall how he had put Ulysses in this space --- for stealing a statue of Pallas from the Palladium --- you would know to be prepared for surprise inclusions from among the apparently heroic.

Meum and Tuum

Today, in these parts, thieves never cease to lead the good life, but in Dante’s Inferno punishment awaits them. The most terrible of these is that they must continuously be bitten by serpents and lizards, disintegrate and return to their original form and this tireless tortuous cycle itself. In her English translation of Dante’s work, Dorothy L. Sayers explains, “Thieves who made no distinction between meum and tuum or mine and thine cannot call their forms or their personalities their own; for in Hell’s horrible parody of exchange the 'I' and the 'thou' fluctuate and are lost.” Just imagine, to have the very premise of thievery dissolved --- that very fine sense of mine and thine.