June 22, 2023
It’s been two months since I started working with Mohan to build Tirsa. Once in a while, you come across people who share the same level of ambition and passion for growth. Mohan is one such guy. He is still in his early 20’s and I am in my early 30’s. This age difference brings two essential elements to a startup journey. He has an aggressive risk-taking personality, whereas I bring in a logical and patience-driven personality. However, we both share this magnanimous goal of making Tirsa a multi-million dollar corporation. And there is Vinod. He is the master of data and data visualization.
This morning, I thought, why not write a story about our journey? In the last two months, one thing I sure learned is, this journey is not going to be straightforward. Irrespective of what we end up achieving, every day we solve problems. Every day we face challenges and, every week there are ups and downs. And this is the secret recipe for a brilliant story.
As a final note, this is a document written by an engineer. It will have bullet points and facts. Therefore, proceed with caution. 🙂
June 28, 2023
The 1st 2 months
It was a Saturday morning. Mohan called me for a chit-chat. He was very specific that it is not-related to Mythiksha and is important. Mythiksha, the ed-tech startup we both were working on, was on the verge of collapsing. I was clueless about my next move. I just came to Bangalore 3 months back, after spending almost 8 years in Delhi, to pursue my goal of becoming the finest Product Manager in India. Though I worked on 2 products from scratch, they were not launched. I had nothing to showcase. My portfolio remained blank.
Coming back to that Saturday, Bhive, our coworking space was organizing an event. The CM of Karnataka was the chief guest of the event. There was only me, Mohan, and Vinod working at the office. We went up to the roof and started talking.
In the last couple of months that I knew Mohan, he seemed to me to be a regular casual 20-year-old. A lean five-feet-something, dark-complexed, typical Andhra guy, always in formal shirt-trousers and slippers, a bizarre combination. Though there was speculation about his side hustles among the office group, I never cared. We spoke only once or twice apart from work, and one thing that stood out is his shrewd business sense. From my previous experience, I could tell all businesses run in a simple principle, revenue – cost = profit. Simple and more versatile revenue sources are the secret to any business’s success. Impressed by his business acumen, I casually told him one day that I would be happy to help him anyhow in his business. I never expected a call from him.
So he started explaining his business plan. He wanted to cut off the local lenders by making the loan process simple and accessible for the mass. There will be a platform/ app that is going to be the face of the entire operation. The app will include applying for loans, and re-payment and gradually he wants to add many more features. He wanted me to help build this platform and scale the business. He said he is already in touch with investors and they are ready to invest. He also told me about a group of companies that are going to support each other and control the entire supply chain. Mohan’s communication was not good at that period. As expected I could not get the entire thing. But in the last 30 years, I learned the value of patience and listening. He shared a couple of sheets and documents and asked me to go through them. The moment I opened those documents, I was stunned. I consider myself an ambitious person, but 20% growth month on month was way above my belief. I laughed for some time. But I sensed a strong self-belief in Mohan’s eyes and clarity in his thought process that kept me thinking. Later that night, I decided to go through the terms he used, one by one, and go deeper into it.
The following week Mohan told me he is taking his office in the same co-working space. Time was going pretty fast. It was just a matter of time before Utkarsh and Ashwini declare the end of Mythiksha. People were asked to leave. CK, Akash, Thiru, and my office gang left one by one. No matter how hard I try, things were getting out of control. Frankly, I did not have much authority. A couple of weeks after my discussion with Mohan, Mythiksha got shut down. I called Mohan that evening, he asked me to come by the next day.
The next morning, we set down in the lounge area in front of Bhive A block and started talking. It was in March if I remember correctly. We had a prolonged discussion on the vision and the next plan. Getting the license of an NBFC and running a financial business requires a lot of certifications. RBI is declining a lot of NBFC licenses recently. So it is not going to be easy. In the meantime, he has partnered with Poornima, who is a seasoned recruiter. We are going to help her in recruitment and return get some commission. This will keep our cash positive. We also decided to launch the website as soon as possible. A website is a form of validation of a business these days. I took up the job of designing, developing, and content writing for the website. Going forward this helped me a lot. For the website, I researched a lot about the lending industry, our direct indirect, and potential competitors, and potential market. I spoke with some customers and some friends who took loans from banks or other financial apps. I designed the page structure and listed down the most common queries that people can have while lending money. This gave me a clear idea about the industry.
By Mid-April, we were working on two fronts at full pace. Hiring and Finance. The registration of Tirsa Capital was done, and GST and other documents were under process. Vinod and Harshita were handling non-it roles, I used to handle IT senior position roles, and Mohan used to handle non-IT senior position roles. By the end of June 2023, our revenue was over 1 Cr. We realized if we continue this performance or even scale up, we don’t need any kind of investment. That’s how we started Tirsa Hiring. We continued with Poornima, plus we started dealing with companies directly. To my surprise, if you can crack the recruitment business, it is a highly profitable industry. Companies are paying avg 8.5% of the employee CTC. A lot of large and mid-size companies are trying to scale this process. On one side, Naukri, Indeed, and Monster try to sell databases. 2nd type of companies like Cutshort, Tophire, Ranstad, Zigsaw, and many more focus on high and mid-level IT roles, where the ROI is high. LinkedIn, Naukri, and Apna charge you to promote your job. There was another type of company that provide jobs to recruitment agencies and freelance recruiters and source via them, like Spottabl. It’s a bloodbath. However, the scope is also huge because everyone knows, irrespective of the world dynamics, India will grow rapidly in the next 20 years. Which means a lot of employment. The actual challenge is to find the gap and scale. On the finance side, we’d need multiple certifications and licenses. We started acquiring them one by one.
Let’s introduce you to Harshitha. Mohan got in touch with her from the same workspace that we were working on. She was an HR/ recruiter in some startup over there. A lady with a small frame yet a large pair of eyes and a relatively small nose, she hails from East Godavari, Andhra. When I spoke with her for the first time, she was in emotional turmoil and left her organization after a fight with her colleague. She asked for a job and an opportunity to learn, and Mohan agreed. After two months by the end of June, she put in her resignation. Her tenure was pretty small. But she taught us an important lesson. We’ll come to that later.
Vinod is again an Andhra guy. He is from Tirupathi, the world-famous temple town of Shri Venkateshwara, and the only married guy in this group. He has broad shoulders and an even broader abdomen, yet I never saw him concerned about overeating.
The majority of our revenue was coming from me and Mohan. Vinod and Harshitha were struggling with their targets. Vinod neither understood nor try to improve his understanding of the recruitment process. He never looked comfortable talking to people. Harshitha, at the beginning, agreed to everything very quickly, yet struggled to achieve the conversion. I and Mohan were able to convert and achieve some good numbers. That was concerning. To scale things up, team performance was crucial. So we decided to hire Soumik, a seasoned recruiter. The objective was to provide necessary training to Vinod and Harshitha, plus build a team that could scale up the numbers.
On May 5, we inaugurated our new office. It was a special day indeed. Everyone was pumped up and excited. Due to cash flow, I and Mohan did not take a salary that month.
The cash flow problem didn’t get over there. Even before we settled down in our new office, the month-end was here. Though we were doing good in terms of numbers, a recruitment agency gets the payment only after the payment terms (45-60 days) of the candidate joining. Therefore, we’d get our payments by mid-July. The last week of May was terrible for us. We were continuously trying to get about 10 lakhs of debt from every source that we could think of. We spent countless hours discussing the possible solutions. I remember one night I could not sleep at all. Being an entrepreneur is not as fancy as the media portrays it to be. You are responsible for business, people, their families, and indirectly their commitments. You need to be aware of all these, yet you cannot let this run over your logic and mental peace. People will only follow you when they realize that you are capable of taking the right decision in critical situations.
There was a lady who runs “Tea Bench” in front of tower A at Bhive’s workspace. During a casual conversation, she told me how much she admires the founders of these startups. When I asked for the reason, she said she admired the risk that we take and the commitment we put into that risk. We managed our money crunch that day itself. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s not the destination, it is the journey that we crave“, I chuckled.
For some reason, my loan applications got approved on the very last day of the month. Thanks to our extraordinary finance system in India and some amazing fintech products built on top of that, the amount was transferred to my account within a couple of hours. I was flabbergasted the entire morning. All kinds of emotions were going through my mind at the same time. I was relieved, excited, happy, and exhausted at the same time. But I could not show such emotions to anyone. The operations must go on. The show must go on.
July 2, 2023
Today, I want to talk about the chemistry between me and Mohan. Over the last couple of months, our bromance has grown deeper. I already mentioned the first couple of meetings and discussions with Mohan.
Previously he used to live in Chandapura, the outskirts of Bangalore. After I pursued him for a couple of weeks, he started seeing the disadvantage of living far from the office, especially in a city like Bangalore. The Silicon Valley of India is famous for its breakfast, weather, and traffic. I stay very close, slightly above one kilometer, and walk every day to the office. After staying at my place for a week or two he started looking for a place nearby. He found a 3bhk in BTR Garden, which is right across the lane where I live.
During his stay at my place, we discussed a lot of things, a roadmap, a to-do list, the vision for Tirsa, our individual aspirations, some philosophy, life, and struggles. I realized we share the same degree of ambition and philosophy. He wants to explore possibilities, I want to scale the solutions. One thing that I felt was new to him is someone challenging his decisions. Being headstrong is a must-have quality in every entrepreneur. An entrepreneur challenges the existing system and brings convenience to society. Mohan is no different. He was not used to taking opinions from others. But I started questioning everything. The word ‘Why’ is very important to me. It provides clarity. And clarity is a critical quality for any leader. My cross-questions give clarity to both of us. It also opens up our strengths and weaknesses. No one is perfect. However, the co-founders should complement each other in terms of the value we are bringing to the table.
We also spend a lot of time outside the office. After the salary drama at the end of May, we went to Cirkus, our usual pub. We were in such a relaxed mode that we decided to take a break that weekend. I called a self-drive car agency at 11:30 pm to try our luck the next morning. As expected, all cars were pre-booked. So we started calling cabs. Over the last two months, we used to collect cab drivers’ numbers whenever we took a cab, without reason. That night it worked. After 6-7 calls a driver agreed. The only thing that was finalized at that moment was we were going out of Bangalore the next morning. We reached home by 1:30-2 drunk, and tired. The next morning we started for Mysore. The plan was to visit the world-famous Mysore Palace and decide on the next destination thereafter. We reached on time, chilled, and took our time to visit the palace. After the palace, we went to Vrindavan Garden. It was supposed to be a major attraction at Mysore, but I was totally disappointed with the way they ruined the entire area. We stayed there at a nearby hotel and left for Coorg the next morning. The entire stretch from Vrindavan Garden to Coorg filled with greenery, random unknown lakes, and fresh air soothed my computer-sickened eyes. Yes, once in a while break is necessary.
We also went to Tirupati once. We overestimated our fitness and took the free darshan where you need to walk from the flats to the top of the mountains. Just to give an idea, I am talking about over 3500 steps. By the first 400 steps, I realized that the plan was terrible. By 600 steps, I promised Mohan that I am quitting smoking the very next day. By 800, I begged for mercy to all my ancestors for my sins to date. I stopped thinking after the 1000th step. I could not go back, so the only way was to move forward. While all these things were going on in my mind, I could not ignore the strengths of my fellow devotees. Some were applying turmeric and kum kum paste on each step, and some were lighting camphor lights. I saw kids supporting their nana-nani climb the steps, a mother taking her child, and an old father carrying his adult specially-abled son on his back to seek Lord Ayappa’s blessing. All were tired, yet some divine energy was pushing them toward the hilltop. I guess, belief is the biggest source of our strength. I hope they all get what they wish for. Even if they do not, a couple of seconds of darshan of lord Ayappa can give profound peace. Because I found my peace. “Govinda Govinda”. Every major temple in India is in a remote place, devotees have to cross great hardship for a glimpse of their lord. My logic behind this is our ancestors want us to leave our ‘Moha Maya behind and see the lord with an empty mind. This was my second visit to Tirupathi yet the experience was as surreal as the first time.
July 9, 2023
Today I want to talk about the human/ employee management crisis that we are currently facing. At the initial stage, startups face all kinds of challenges. Some struggle for funding, some to sell their product, and some stuck with the legalities and processes. For me, it is building the right team. It is crucial for any startup to place the right people in the right role. Our initial thought at Tirsa was to form a lending business. It takes a lot of licensing and legalities for a company to set up a lending business in India. It takes time. To stay cashflow positive during this time, we decided to explore the recruitment industry.
The first two months were fantastic. Between me and Mohan, we generated slightly over 1 Cr revenue. This much growth gave us hope that with this growth rate, Tirsa Hiring can easily accommodate the initial funding of Tirsa Capital and Tirsa Business. Tirsa Capital is NBFS and Tirsa Business is FinTech. To scale the recruitment we started looking for experienced recruiters. Mohan hired Soumik. We gave Soumik a free hand to scale up the entire recruitment department. We told him, that as long as he achieves his target, he is free to take leaves, work from home, and hire any number of people within a budget. He shortlisted four recruiters, Purva, Abhishek, Gopi, and Hari. Purva has 12-14 years of experience in recruitment. Abhishek has 5-6 years of experience in Indian and USA recruitment. Gopi and Hari, who later turned out to be classmates of Mohan from his hometown have 6 months to a year of experience. Mohan also connected with a friend of his, Charishma, who has 6 months of experience. In total, we had almost 26 years of experience. The problem started after they started operating. By simple arithmetic, our numbers should shoot up at least 6 times. But our placement numbers and revenue shrinks down 75% in the month of June. And that is not it. 90% of the closures were done by Charishma, Hari, and Gopi, the relatively inexperienced bunch. Soumik, Purva, and Abhishek combined have zero placements. All of their shortlisted candidates were either rejected or absent from the interview. In the last 45 days of working, Soumik has had zero placements. Apart from performance, Soumik also showed disciplinary issues. He took leaves multiple times without delegating his responsibilities. Once he was absent (read vanished) for an entire week without any explanation. Almost every Friday he took sick leave. All these are his personal problems which needed to be dealt with separately. However, the question is, does their performance imply that the experienced people are incompetent? Or the problem lies somewhere else. How do you encourage people to come out of their comfort zone and perform? Or some people are just beyond motivation.
With all these questions in mind, we tried to talk to Soumik multiple times. But each time such discussions pushed Soumik in a negative direction. He became reckless and defensive. His performance deteriorated even further. Last week I released him from all his managerial responsibilities and put him under PIP (Performance Improvement Plan). I asked him to focus only on his numbers. Alas! He stopped coming to the office the very next week. He started missing the team calls. I tolerated all these, hoping that it would improve his numbers. I believe once a man becomes defensive, he starts seeing negativity in everything. It requires grit and character to stand your ground and fight. If he doesn’t improve his numbers, sadly I have to terminate his employment.
After a week of unexplained absence again, on Friday, June 16, Soumik put down his papers and asked to be released from his position.
Abhishek and Purva are permanently working from home. Abhishek is from Lucknow. Purva is from Jaipur. None of them are performing as expected, yet I can see Purva is trying her best. The reason is she is constantly in touch with me, sharing the challenges, clarifying the doubts, and asking for feedback. Her intent is positive. Whereas Abhishek seems unmoved about his low numbers. At the end of the day when Abhishek informs us that he connected with 20 people and none of them got back, it didn’t seem right. Communication is very important at every stage of an organization. An open and honest conversation can open up a lot of puzzles. As a leader, it is our responsibility to present a dream and align everyone to the same vision. In return, we expect honest intent and a positive mindset from the team.
There is another person I cannot miss while we are talking about the employee management crisis. She is Harshitha. I already mentioned how she joined the organization. She was responsible for HR roles within Tirsa. Apart from that, she was also aligned with the recruitment team. The first 45 days were absolutely positive. She showed great interest in learning and taking responsibility. We started thinking of including her as a director. The day she heard about the plan, her attitude changed 180 degrees. She started disrespecting Vinod, questioning Mohan’s decision, and avoiding me. In the last week of June, she informed us that her sister was expecting and she needed to take care of her. She took a week-long work from home. However she did not go to her hometown, she was in Hyderabad. We got to know this from the audit report of our attendance software. After two weeks she returned. In those two weeks, her output as a recruiter was almost zero. Later she started demanding 4 months of work from home. With every possible consideration, at this stage, we could not afford to give WFH, especially when she was underperforming. Even on her personal front, she had a lot to learn about our existing systems and processes. WFH makes sense only if you are an individual contributor. When you are responsible for multiple things and deal with a variety of stakeholders at different levels, you need to be physically present. We explained this. She denied it and decided to put down her papers. However, the tragedy was yet to follow. She took a screenshot of her resignation letter and dropped it in the work WhatsApp group for the entire team. In her imagination, some internal politics were going on against her in the team, so she wanted everyone to know why she was resigning. This action of hers immediately damaged two things. One is the trust and respect among the team members due to some imaginary politics. Second, it gave others the courage to disobey the process thereafter. As expected, I terminated her employment immediately and personally wrote the acceptance letter.
There are a couple of lessons that I learnt from these events.
- Some skills are inherited like personal traits, and some are acquired, like hard skills. You can teach someone to write, code, sing and do stuff. But you cannot teach them to take responsibility and ownership. You cannot expect them to take challenges. Skill < Mentality
- A good employee or person is good because he/ she is responsible. He/ she doesn’t expect to be managed. For a defined target the team will come up with solutions. Or at least they will come up with problems, instead of excuses. This will also inject a sense of inclusion into the team. The “what” is to be decided by management, remaining “how” and “when” should be decided by the team.
- Little things matter. If you follow closely, a person’s approach to small challenges, when he joins the meetings, and how he manages his time says a lot about his personality.
- Whether it’s personal brand building or team building, it takes time. To begin with, you set yourself smaller targets, and keep your promises. With each success, people will join you. Only constant success can bind a group together.
July 17, 2023
Today I want to share how we came up with the “Tirsa Business Ka Business”.
Mohan’s vision was to build Tirsa Business as a Fintech company. But he did not have any clear picture. With the rise of fintech infrastructure in India in recent years, a lot of companies emerged with different solutions. Starting from stocks and mutual funds to payment gateway solutions, QR codes, personal finance management apps, credit card management, and cryptocurrency startups dived deep into financial convenience and user experience. Among all other domains under fintech, lending money is becoming the talk of the town these days. So we started thinking about lending.
Companies like MoneyView, and Kreditbee started primarily as money lending platforms. Whereas Cred, IndMoney, and Growww began a wing to dig through side by side with their primary businesses. In the beginning, I mentioned how we managed the initial salary crisis for Tirsa Capital. I used around 10 lakh of personal loan from 4 different platforms. As a first-hand customer, I realized, that the lending domain has become a bloodbath. With this many options, it is very hard to make a brand or trust. You need to deal with much more than convenience, quickest time, and user experience. In my case, the first choice was the platform that gave me the maximum loan amount with the least interest. Then came the time of loan approval. Once the documents were uploaded, it was just a matter of 10 minutes before the loan amount was deposited into my account. Though I was an old customer of Cred, it was not my first choice. Therefore, I concluded that lending is a no-go, I don’t want to fight with big sharks for customer acquisition.
Zerodha and Growww have already captured the market in stocks and mutual funds with their tech and brand value. Paytm and PhonePay are established in payments and QR codes. Razorpay is doing phenomenal in payment gateway solutions. All these big players have enormous budgets and strong tech teams. We can not go head to head with them. We need to find a gap and grow silently.
It’s been over 12 years since I have been living on my own. And I found cooking to be one of my hobbies. I take my time, play some music and enjoy the whole process of cleaning, chopping, and cooking. It rejuvenates my mind. One evening a dear friend called up when I was preparing my dinner. One thing led to another and we started talking about taxes. He told me how we are paying so much taxes and not really using any Govt facilities. That sentence stemmed me from chopping. I allowed him to talk with mild ‘hmm’. My eyes sparkled for a second. A chill ran through my brain. I could not contain my grin. I told my friend that I’d call him in some time and dialed Mohan. Mohan reached within 5 minutes. I made him sit near the kitchen and asked him to light a smoke. I only have the blurred vision. Yet I was finding it challenging to contain my excitement. I needed to pour my vision and the possibilities into a story and present it like a dream. I inhaled deeply and started.
That is all I can share right now. I promise once we accomplish something, I’ll come back and complete this story.
Aug 10, 2023 > The last Chapter. Putting Garapati Mohan Konda Seshsai behind bars
Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined that I would be forced to write the final chapter so soon. So much has happened in the last two to three weeks, from July 20 to August 8, 2023, that I can’t even remember them in order. Reality smacked everyone on the team and anyone involved with Tirsa Capital. Whatever I could remember in order
- We got to know that Tirsa Capital did not have any revenue from recruitment. There have been no invoices or bills raised in the last four months. Whatever figures Mohan stated in meetings or even on the investor pitch slides were all made up.
- He has nothing. The total sum of his 15-20 savings accounts is less than Rs 300. He has no gold, land, or businesses. He doesn’t have any other businesses going on at the same time. He does not have any financial backing. Everything he has said in the last year has been proven to be false.
- His parents haven’t seen him in six months. He stole and defrauded his parents as well. He showed me a guy and introduced him as his father. When I met his family the last Saturday, he was a different person.
- There are no Anish or Rajendra Uncle investors prepared to invest $30 million in Tirsa as debt.
- No one has been paid for the last two months. This affects me the most. Mohan never made any connection with the employees. I was at the helm, handling the team and the operations. I used to reassure them, making them believe that everything is okay. And they are not going to get paid anytime soon.
- We, Mohan and Vinod, took Mohan at his word and gave him a large sum of money. We obtained high-interest personal loans from various Fintech applications and transferred them to both the Company’s and Mohan’s personal accounts. He was the only signatory of the bank accounts. We had no clue what was happening. He could withdraw the funds anytime he pleased and spend them anywhere he pleased. As I write this, Mohan is in arrears on 40 lakhs in loans, employee salaries, office rent, and dwelling rent.
- We put Mohan into custody and lodged an FIR against him for financial fraud.
Now, let’s take you through the last couple of days. The last entry in this story was around July 20, 2023. I was exhilarated by my brilliant idea of a credit card for Tirsa Business. I was so excited that I forgot about the salary for the next couple of days. The team was getting anxious. But they kept on working. I kept on working. The next week Tirsa came. Tirsa is Mohan’s childhood love, currently married to someone else. He convinced her to come to Bangalore and spend a couple of days. By the time she left, it was month end. We were following up with Mohan. I was personally following up with him, every time we used to meet. Every time he gave me some bullshit reason. He spoke about his gold coins, which he is going to deposit to get a loan. But his mother refused to give him bills and certificates. I asked him about our FD. He signed a check of 10 lakhs in front of me have handed it over to the HDFC guys. He told me, he has already used it to obtain NBFC licenses. I asked about client bills, that we are supposed to get at the end of June. The said amount is over 20 lakhs. He said he is following up with the client, their finance manager is out for this week. The payment will be released the next week. What about the investors? What about Anish and Rajendra Uncle? He didn’t want to go to Anish, because he didn’t pick his calls for the last 3 weeks. Rajendra Uncle is too busy and a big political figure, he calls when he wants. And stupid Abhinandan never cross-questioned Mohan. He was blinded by his ambitions and dreams. He wanted to build something, a platform that he designed and developed. He wanted millions of people to use that. He wanted a name for himself.
I don’t have the right words to explain what I was thinking, but there will never be a dawn in my life when I won’t curse myself for my foolishness. I betrayed my team, ruined my self-respect, and murdered my reputation by my fatuity.
Sometime between July 31 and August 1, Vinod came to me. With a lot of hesitation, he explained what he could gather from different sources. Initially, I laughed at him. But he was adamant on his facts. I started thinking. And at that moment reality hit me. I never saw his house, nor gold coins, nor money. I paid for the only month’s salary we received. I paid for his washing machine. He never spent any significant amount on the company or its operations. He doesn’t even attend the calls from his own team. I could not feel my legs. My vision was blurred. I asked Vinod to leave and started drawing a chart on my whiteboard – what I knew, what I got to know just then, and what I suspected. I couldn’t finish the chart. I knew what was done. I was sleepless the entire night.
The next morning I rushed to Mohan’s place. Vinod reached right after me. We all started talking. Mohan was talking to us separately, he said he has some FD of 48 lakhs in Guntur. We demanded the company’s bank statement. I refused to go to Guntur without checking the FD amount online. He started giving me excuses. I signaled Vinod that at least one of us has to be there with him so that he cannot escape. With every passing minute, he was giving new stories. Charishma and Pravallika have been staying with Mohan for the last couple of months. They were leaving that night. I asked Vinod to accompany him and bring him back. By that time my ex-colleague and good friend Abhijot came to meet me. So I went back home. I told the entire story to Abhijot. Abhijot was stunned. We decided we would confront Mohan.
We first ask about the invoices he has generated over the months. He had none. We asked him for the actual amount of business we did, and what was the proof that we were going to get the money. Where were the client agreements? Who were his POCs in the client who were giving us money without bills and what us the objective? Then we opened up the current account statement and asked about the transactions. As we kept on questioning and cross-questioning him, he got cornered. We took him to his parents at Chandapura. His family lives in a 1Bhk in a lower middle-class area. His parents didn’t want to take any responsibility and asked us to take him to the police station. The next afternoon we took him to the Bandepalya Police Station and registered a complaint. I am submitting a copy of the FIR here for reference.
Now we visit the police station daily to get an update on the investigation. He vanished over 20 lakhs in the last 3-4 months. Police are too busy to cross-check the accounts and trace any amount. Now we don’t even have enough to pay our EMIs every month. With everything happening around him, Mohan kept his silence and posture. There is no sign of conflict of morals or humanity on his face. He is a cold-blooded criminal and if left free, he is the next Sukesh Chandrasekhar.
I never thought this journey to end like this. I never wanted this journey to have such an ending. However the almighty must have some other plans for me. Till then, adios.
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