'Lucky Baskhar' Movie Ending Explained & Summary: Was Baskhar Equally Liable As Harsha Mehra?

Directed by Venky Atluri, Lucky Baskhar is the story of a cashier who plays his cards in a manner that nobody could have imagined and goes from rags to riches in no time. Baskhar toiled hard, but for the longest time, he never got the returns he deserved. When people let him down, he decided that he had had enough. He decided to take the bull by its horns and do something to change his deplorable situation. So, let’s find out what Baskhar did and how he was able to get out of that mess.

Spoiler Alert

What deal did Baskhar make with Anthony? 

Baskhar was a cashier at the Magadha Bank, and he was hired at a humble salary of Rs 6,000. He was anxiously waiting to be promoted, as his boss, Himanshu, had told him that he would vouch for him during the meeting with his superiors. But the management chose Sudheer, Baskhar’s colleague, instead of him, and then Baskhar was disheartened and shattered. The man was in a lot of debt; he hadn’t paid his son’s school fees, he had to look after his siblings, and he knew that with his meagre remunerations, he wouldn’t be able to do anything. Baskhar, during his lunchtime, sat in a cafe just next to the bank, and he wrote the applications and checks of various people who came to the bank and couldn’t do so on their own. In return, he charged them a small fee for his services. 

One day, a man named Anthony came to Baskhar and asked him to get his loan application approved. Anthony didn’t have anything that he could use as collateral, and Baskhar more than once had told him that his application would get rejected. But after Baskhar didn’t get the promotion, something changed inside him. He had been awarded the best employee certificate for the past three years consecutively, but then he realized that it all amounted to nothing. Anthony had imported some electronic items from Malaysia, but just before the goods arrived in India, his investor backed out and ditched him. Now Anthony just needed a couple of lakhs to pay the customs officers, as they’d told him that, otherwise, everything would go on auction. Baskhar stole the money from his bank and gave it to Anthony. Anthony almost doubled the amount and returned Baskhar’s share to him along with the loan amount. 

Baskhar was a cashier, and he operated the bank vault on a regular basis. He started taking money from the bank on a regular basis, and then, as soon as Anthony gave him his share of the profits, he quietly went and put the cash back in the bank locker. Baskhar and his friend Samba started earning huge amounts of money, and the former could give his family the life he always wanted. He could buy expensive jewellery for his wife, and for his son, the toys he had always desired. Anthony’s son got settled in Boston, and Anthony also decided that, after doing one last job, he too would leave India. Baskhar, Samba and Anthony sold three imported cars, and through that deal, they earned more than they could have imagined. Baskhar felt that he would go back to leading a normal life, but he had no clue what fate had in store for him.

How was Harsha Mehra committing banking fraud? 

Himanshu and Sudheer got caught by the AGM, and it came to be known that they were involved in a banking scam. Baskhar, that same day, was going to return the amount that he had stolen from the bank to buy those imported cars. Baskhar was lucky that day, and if things had not gone his way, then Vinod, his boss, would have surely caught him red-handed. But that didn’t happen, and another unprecedented development changed Bashkar’s life forever. From a cashier, he was made the AGM of the Magadha Bank, and he couldn’t believe that something like that could happen. Baskhar’s salary was increased, and that was a huge improvement from what he was getting as a cashier. One of the main jobs that any AGM had to do was to sign off on bank receipts and give authorization to the borrowers. Now, a lot of times, these borrowers were top-notch brokers who acted as intermediaries between two banks. In Baskhar’s case, a broker named Harsha Mehra (we all know who the filmmaker is referring to here) acted as an intermediary between Magadha and Katari Bank. 

Now, what Harsha did was that after taking money from Magadha Bank, he invested that amount in the share market, rigged the stocks, and earned a lot of profit by doing so. Then, he deposited the capital amount in the Katari bank, keeping all the profits for himself. Baskhar was a smart man, and he realized what Harsha was up to. Baskhar did all his dealings with Harsha’s PA and a broker, Suraj, and he told the latter that he not only wanted a share in the proceeds, but he also wanted to know, a day prior, which shares Harsha was rigging. So, by doing that, Baskhar bought those shares at a lower price and sold them off the very next day when the prices spiked due to market manipulation. This arrangement went on for a very long time, but then, one day, all hell broke loose. Before Baskhar could be caught by the authorities, his own wife and father gave him a reality check. I believe that this reality check became a saving grace for Baskhar, as otherwise, just like his colleagues, he too would have been put behind bars. 

How did Baskhar trick his superiors? 

Baskhar always said one thing: a good player is not the one who wins, but the one who stops just before he knows his downfall is going to begin. Nobody can win all the time, and Baskhar knew that sooner or later, the law enforcement authorities would catch hold of him. He also understood that his own bank was issuing fake bank receipts to Harsha and making him sign off on them. So basically, Chairman Rajbir Lokhande and Vinod were trying to make him a scapegoat, and they, too, had knowledge about all the dealings, i.e., the buying and selling of shares, that Baskhar was undertaking. They didn’t tell him anything because they knew that, when the time came, they would need to show the authorities that hundreds of crores existed in Baskhar’s bank account. But Baskhar was always a step ahead of them. After his father and his wife had an argument with him, he decided to call it quits. He then started destroying each and every piece of evidence that could incriminate him. Without informing anyone, Baskhar closed his bank account and withdrew all his money. Then he went to the RBI and reported that some fraudulent activities were happening in his bank. Baskhar eventually stopped signing off on the bank receipts of Harsha Mehra, and he told his superiors that he would not continue with the fraud. Baskhar resigned from his post after he had a spat with Vinod, and he made sure that the entire office saw him as a victim. When CBI Officer Laxman Rao, who was also working for Harsha Mehra, came to investigate the matter, he told Baskhar that he had no way out and that if he transferred a sum of 100 crores back to Grow High company which was one of Harsha’s shell companies, then that could be deposited in the Katari bank, and then it could be shown that there was no default on the bank’s part. Baskhar did what he was asked to do, but then later Vinod and the chairman got the shock of their lives. Baskhar invested those 100 crores in the US market, and he bought himself a new life. He did all that with Anthony’s help, who was already settled in the US and had a lot of contacts there. Baskhar shifted to Boston with his entire family, and Vinod, Lokhande, and CBI officer Laxman Rao were charged with embezzlement of funds and conspiring with Mehra to orchestrate one of the biggest scams that the country had ever witnessed. 

Was Baskhar Equally Liable As Harsha Mehra? 

In Lucky Baskhar’s ending, our protagonist bought a new life for himself, and the film sort of validated whatever he did, but one cannot deny that he had an equal role to play in the scam, if not a larger one. Baskhar’s wife, Sumathi, knew that her husband hadn’t earned all that money through legal channels, but she didn’t ask him anything, probably because she was too scared to know what he had done. Baskhar committed the perfect crime, and things rather fell into place for him quite conveniently. I don’t think that anybody who is involved in a scam where the stakes are so high can so easily mislead the authorities and make an escape. Now, Baskhar can put forward an argument that he was a victim of his circumstances, and the system failed to help his cause. The film tries its level best to glorify his actions and portray him as a Robin Hood who took from the corrupt and gave to the poor. But that, again, for me, isn’t a sound reason or justification for why Baskhar committed all those illegal activities. Baskhar will probably lead a happy life in America, but there will be days when the ghost of his past life will haunt him in his dreams. 

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