Editor’s note: I have finally learnt to embed tweets in the newsletter. I cannot now be stopped. Enjoy!
Wealthy Brown Munda now UK PM: Colonialist loss or Capitalist win?
Rishi Sunak, an African-Punjabi investment banker who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer for the UK government the last two years, has become its newly appointed Prime Minister.
Reviews are in and they are mixed. Well… yes, a brown man has ascended to immense power in the UK, a country with a glorious past of murdering and pillaging people who look like him. The irony is thick and sweet and makes for great twitter jokes. OTOH, Sunak is also a shining beacon of exploitative capitalism with shady a financial past who, by the way, might just be “too rich to be PM”. So who is this guy and how did he get here? Let’s dive in.
A riches to riches story
Newest WhatsApp forwards star Rishi Sunak was born to a business family and immediately sent off to Oxford for a finance degree followed by a Stanford MBA. Here he scored straight A’s and wooed his now-wife, Akshata Murthy. They got married in 2009 and fled to the UK to pursue their shared passion: politics and paisa. Sunak’s real passion though, admittedly, was always competitive ballroom dancing(?!).
Before Sunak entered politics, he was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs (ofcourse… look at his face) and then a hedge fund manager for years while co-running projects at his father-in-law’s backyard business. Oh nothing grand, just his little side hustle passion project called… Infosys Ltd. Living modestly on his small savings from these jobs, Sunak forayed into politics as Member of the Parliament in 2014, and then as Chief Secy to the Treasury in 2019.
Sunak was a lapdog to Boris Johnson (UK’s 144p copy of Trump) and held the fort for him in many debates and campaigns as part of Britain’s Conservative Party. A whole year of ass-licking helped him get appointed to Chancellor of the Exchequer as a highly improper ‘personal favour’ from Boris. Once at the Exchequer, he and his piggy bank were immediately exposed to public scrutiny. And what the public scrutinised was shaaady.
The hera pheri
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is equivalent to the Finance Minister here in India. UK law mandates full and transparent financial disclosures from someone taking up such a post — which Sunak furnished for himself pretty adequately. What he conveniently forgot about was his wife’s ginormous fucking bank account.
Daughter of Infosys founder NR Naryana Murthy, Akshata inherits fat cash in generational, capital and incidental wealth. She also owns Cloudtail — yep, that omnipresent Amazon seller. But Sunak only disclosed her holding in Catamaran Ventures, a (sort of?) shell Infosys offshoot in the UK, and skipped over how she currently owns half of Pune and Bangalore, to say the least.
Her ties with Infosys and Amazon were significant at the time, because the UK government was entering into a number of contracts with tech giants and developing a new tax policy for MNCs like Amazon. Under his watch, Infosys won contracts that were blatantly biased in their favour, and the Exchequer advocated for laxer corporate tax. Hubby played well, but people noticed. The Guardian launched two investigations (paywalled, sry!) into Sunak’s illicit affairs and found his financial disclosures to be vastly deficient. Erstwhile PM Boris said its fiiiiiine guys chiiiiiill and let him get away with it. So as punishment for all his hera pheri, he is now the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Marital bliss, Infosys
Akshata owns about 1% equity at pappa’s Infosys which, in dividends, made her 126 Crore INR just in 2022 (and the fucking year isn’t over yet). Not that she needs it though. She’s an Indian national living in the UK on non-domicile status, which allows her to earn big bucks without paying a penny in taxes for 15 years. Hello??? Why am I, a 0% equity holder at Infosys, then paying a trip to Vietnam's worth of income tax every month to a PM that doesn’t have an undergraduate degree???
I’ll admit, it’s weird to not pay state tax when your spouse is the constitutional head of aforesaid state. Akshata will continue to enjoy the tax exemption through Sunak’s term, which has definitely riled up some distrust in the British janta. I’ll allow her benefit of the doubt though: what if this is her way of getting back at the Royal Fam for our stolen Kohinoor? Honestly, girlboss. (Akshata if you’re reading this and need a new friend, I’m available)
Too rich to be PM?
At a networth of 450+ Million GBP, Akshata Murthy was richer than Queen Elizabeth at the time of her death, by quite a margin. And that’s just her — Sunak brings in another fraction making them one of the most rich-and-powerful jodi of modern day. I am once again asking — me and who?
On a serious note, imagine if Elon Musk ran your country. Who do you think the tax plans, immigration law and environment policies will back — the rich or the poor? Markets will open up, regulation will diminish, people will be reduced to a workforce, the wealth gap will widen and widen till the bottom half buckles in its own weight and falls off. This is the promise of Sunak’s UK… so not too different from its last two Prime Ministers. Also, this is the Conservatives Party and our man’s brownness does not exempt him from his peers’ (and his own) bigotry. Best believe there will be no big desh-bhakti moment as he makes life hell for UK’s brown refugees, and certainly no Namaste London speech at the Parliament.
Rishi Sunak is a wealthy UK national first, a brown munda second, a kinda hot hubby who helps wife evade taxes third, and a good Prime Minister last.
Update Corner: Meta v Wire
Last week, we did a quick sweep of the Meta v Wire mess… which still remains a mess. Soon after I put out the edition, Wire stated that it was pulling back the story for the moment and conducting an internal review of its evidence and arguments. This is kinda cool btw: it’s probably the first time Indian journalism is engaging with tech and metadata on such a granular and watertight level. Well, the results are out! Drumroll please…
Would you look at that sweet royal mammoth fuck up. They posted a vague excuse of an apology to their readers because, well, they were wrong. The rundown is: we can’t say we fabricated evidence, but someone probably did and we let it slide. Or maybe we did, who knows! Not us! We just fucked up haha because tech is sooo scary and new to us. Sorry won’t happen again!!! xoxo. I can’t say I’m surprised, no one is. The only upside to this is that the original Wire investigation re Meta’s XCheck has opened a can of worms which needs further investigation. Meta tried to push it aside with this evidence fabrication drama, but nope, people are still talking about it. A win is a win?
Quickie: It’s time to say goodbYe
Balenciaga and Adidas, leading creative collaborators with Kanye West, have now cut ties with him following anti (semitic? black? asian? women? climate?) (this time, antisemitic) remarks he made on Twitter.
He’s beingly widely condemned for his recent pattern of misbehaviour, which includes a White Lives Matter tee and subsequent slander of legendary Vogue editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. Balenciaga was the first to say fuck you. The Kardashians (two or more of them) tweeted more fuck yous. MRC, a studio producing Kanye’s upcoming documentary, dropped the project. The Creative Artists Agency dropped him as a client. GAP, Footlocker and other Yeezy partners removed the product from their shelves.
Curiously, all this happened around the same time Taylor Swift released the track Karma as part of her new album. She and karma do vibe like that.
D-recs corner
Hello! Here are this week’s recs. I’ll keep it short because there’s a grueling crossword at the end of it today!
This week I watched…
Nothing. I was sad and busy. I did rewatch one of my favourite movies of all time though, Set it Up on Netflix, for the feelgoodfeels. If you haven’t seen it yet, Set it Up is a sweet unconventional romcom that’s light enough to digest with a meal but carries some powerpacked dialogue (“you like because and you love despite”… TEARS!!!) and endearing acting. Go watch it please.
Tune therapy
What a week for music.
Taylor Swift released her highly anticipated album, Midnights, with bonus tracks in a 3AM Edition. She also dropped two music videos. The album is a 20-track autobiographical crowdpleaser with catchy synth-pop beats and devastating lyrics, per usual. Arctic Monkeys stunned us with The Car, a soothing and succinct 10-track album that has the Tranquility Base tone but with a newfound sadness. The 1975 dropped an instant dance classic in the form of Being funny in a Foreign Language, a perfectly cheesy Sunday pick-me-up. And Carly Rae Jepsen gave us the loveliest time with The Loneliest Time.
My instant faves, if you’re looking to catch up, are: Maroon, Would’ve… and Snow on the Beach from Midnights (3AM), Body Paint and Sculptures of Anything Goes from The Car, and Happiness and I’m in Love With You from BFIAFL. I haven’t heard Carly yet but the millennial in me will find her top two soon.
Can I trust you with a crossword?
Yes, I can. 25 of you cracked it the last time, which is 25 more than I was expecting to even open the link and check it out.
So here is another, this time trickier and with a theme. Solve it here.
Now beware: there are some intentional misdirections in this puzzle. Answers are simple, but clues exist to confuse more than aid. Stick to your instincts — the worst that can happen is you will have to erase and redo a segment. That’s just life isn’t it. Also: in case you need quick pointers on how to construe clues, check out this guide I posted with last week’s puzzle.
Happy solving! And please write to me if you figure out the theme:)
And that’s the week’s charcha!
You’ve reached the end of edition four of Charcha Weekly! Sorry for the delay in publishing again, life is hard sometimes. Sending love and resilience to all as we go back to work after week-long festivities. See ya!