Latest news with #Metkem

New Indian Express

Silicon, scams, and a spy named solly

The cast of characters makes for an interesting lineup. There's Ramani with his penchant for tired jokes. Dr Dayal from the DNES with his manic laughter, and two Tweedledee-Tweedledum scientists from IISC Bangalore. There's Rajiv Gandhi's chief of intel, Praveen Jain, and there's Dr Angela Britto at Seshadri's unit, as well as her hapless colleague Vinod Pandey, whose homosexuality is the least of his problems. All of these people have been written up so divertingly that the reader quickly starts to form a picture of them. At the heart of the story is Metkem's bid to make and supply silicon all over the country and Seshadri's determination to stop them from doing so. Seshadri's audacious acts quite make the reader's jaw drop, even as the aforementioned reader is pretty sure that our Man in Delhi, Solly Nilla, will definitely throw a monkey wrench into Seshadri's work. The snark is delicious, as when we get a description of Seshadri admiring his profile just when a ray of sunlight crept in through the window and framed his reflection in a halo, and he felt a rush of messianic delight. Or Pandey looking like a troubled character in a dimly lit Shakespearean tragedy asking himself, 'What's loyalty? Loyalty is such a shifting target, so elusive and so enigmatic.' The question arises whether Seshadri is discrediting Metkem at the behest of a foreign power. But Seshadri's character is so well delineated that the reader fully understands the bloated sense of pride that drives the bombastic man to do what he does.