The Rise And Fall Of Amar Singh

In the 1983 film Zelig, Woody Allen (who also wrote and directed the movie) plays the eponymous hero; a man who manages somehow to know everyone (from F Scott Fitzgerald to Adolf Hitler) and who turns up at every important event. The film is a mockumentary, which is to say that it is made to look like a documentary with shots of the fictional Zelig inserted into actual footage of real events.

I first met Amar Singh around four years after I saw the movie and in my mind, Amar Singh was always the Indian Zelig: a man who managed to work his way into any situation of consequence and to stand shoulder to shoulder with any important person he saw.

I first met Amar Singh after I moved to Calcutta in 1986. He was no big deal then. Though he was a Rajput, his twin claims to fame were his association with the city’s prosperous Marwari community and his friendship with Bengal Congress leaders.

As he was neither much of a businessman nor a politician of any great consequence, he was already punching much above his weight. He could get the city’s richest men --- the Birlas, the Goenkas, and others --- on the phone and became involved, at a high level, in the feuds that characterized the Bengal Congress of that era. (He was pro-Subrata Mukherjee, anti-Mamata Banerjee and so on.)

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