Jamim courted controversy in his brief life and even shorter professional career. A self-professed tax defaulter -- of mere Rs 400,000-500,000 in his own words -- he was accused of illegally bringing gold to the country, fake Indian currency racket and many more, but was never legally charged for any offense. [break]
He has left his family with three blacklistings for financial irregularities to deal with. And then there is a "small matter" of repaying debts worth around Rs 500 million to Rastriya Banijya Bank and Nepal Bangladesh Bank for which even the properties of relatives have been put up as collateral.
All this has left his bereaved family in an awkward situation.
Born 47 years ago in Watu, Kathmandu as the second son to a government officer-- his father Dr Moin Shah retired as a joint-secretary of Ministry of Agriculture -- he did his SLC from Durbar High School and wanted to become a pilot. But he quit his pilot course midway and returned home from Taiwan to start a small business of video cassettes.
His meteoric rise from a relative nonentity after getting an exclusive right to cable television at an early age of 29 caught everybody´s imagination. He then started the first private television channel in Nepal and published English and Nepali national dailies, which he stopped publishing after attack at his office in 2004 following the killing of 12 Nepalis in Iraq.
The very fact that he rose from relative obscurity created doubts as to how he could invest such a huge amount of money to start his media business. And then Jammu, as he was lovingly called by his near and dear ones, also had Kashmiri family roots -- to which he attributed the allegations about his underworld and ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) connections.
He loved telling anecdotes of his struggle in his early adulthood. He would repeatedly recount how he even struggled to buy milk for his newborn son Zaki, following problems with family after marrying his Newari sweetheart Anjali Pradhan at the age of 19. He would also brag about carrying the poles while establishing his cable network to portray himself as a self-made man.
For a not so profoundly learned man, he was remarkably good with numbers and blessed with a very sharp memory. And he was street smart. He was not that much of a reader but he used socialization as the means of acquiring knowledge and used his connections very cleverly to climb the ladder of success.
His handling of financial matters made him an enigma. His media business was in doldrums even as he was raking in a large sum of money through his cable business. He would not pay his media staffers for months on end, yet he surprisingly maintained a lavish lifestyle. His staffers were even baffled by his apparent negligence about leakages of his cable revenue from more than 25,000 homes given his financial difficulties.
He was health conscious and maintained his strapping figure by regularly working out. He was a heavy smoker but was a near teetotaler and he also ate healthy. Yet he twice had heart attacks. It had perhaps to do with the stress of the massive debt and underworld allegations -- the stress he also attributed to the death of his mother.
He used to sing around at his office exercising his relatively gifted vocal chords giving a sense of casual comfort to his staffers, but they dreaded his unpredictable decisions. The portrayal of him as an ISI agent and Dawood Ibrahim´s stooge by Indian and Nepali media made him conscious of his security threat. And he never trusted anyone.
He never maintained a daily routine, was never on time for his appointments -- he would either be very early or well late and would often change his route and medium of conveyance to avert possible attempts on his life. His taking sauna at noon in Yak & Yeti Hotel may also have been out of caution, but for once his precautions did not work.
premdhakal@myrepublica.com
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