Satyameva Jayate

Truth alone triumphs. So goes India's national motto.

With Ramalinga Raju now in penitentiary (and refusing his meals we are told!), the brutal irony of that motto, in the present circumstance, seems to be lost on a number of people. It is almost as if that line from the Upanishads was a forewarning of Raju's delusional mind and his horrendous actions that have left a once proud company in ruins. Maybe we should not have translated the Sanskrit. Satyam the company was meant to triumph. So believed Raju and so it was.

India had enough problems on its hands. It could have done without the horror show we've witnessed over the last 5 days. An icon of industry, a pioneer in the BPO field, a great firm built over more than two decades now lies in tatters. 53000 (even this is possibly inflated)lives have been directly affected. What are Satyam's employees to do? What of their families? Millions of shareholders have seen their stock worth plummet, both through direct ownership of Satyam stock as well as through the fall in the stock exchanges; inevitable given Satyam's effect on the exchanges. Who is answerable to them? Satyam's board had long vanished before the government decided to supersede what was left of it. Are the new board members expected to feign remorse? How shall they be held accountable for what is none of their doing? They shall be judged solely for their management of affairs from here on. But what of the grave crimes that have been committed already?

Warren Buffet called derivatives financial WMDs. As we are increasingly seeing, any financial instrument is a WMD in itself. Ramalinga Raju has proved this beyond doubt. One man's Satyam has destroyed thousands of lives. What he deemed to be Satyam was what it became. He chose cash balances for the company, operating revenues, debts outstanding, accrued interest and by proxy, the stock price. Satyam was in Raju's mind alone, it did not exist as such anywhere else. The satyam (truth) about Satyam was something completely different. It was a bunch of lies cooked up by a delusional man who has lost all sense of reality and has been, by his own admission, for some years now, living in his own fantasy land.

He is answerable for what he has done.

Let us hope for once we mete out suitable punishment to Messrs. Raju and family and whoever else our justice system finds to be involved. Let our national motto be affirmed in the way it was meant to be. Let satyam, as in truth, triumph. Let not Satyam, as in Ramalinga Raju, triumph.