Kookie Gulati’s The Big Bull faces two major disadvantages. The first is that Harshad Mehta, the stock broker who inspired the movie, has already served as the subject of a detailed web series. The second is that the multi-crore securities scam engineered by Mehta in the early 1990s, though by no means negligible, has been followed by other, more sensational frauds. The SonyLIV series Scam 1992 used real names while dramatising actual incidents. The Big Bull invents a new identity for its anti-hero, Hemant Shah, but closely follows the milestones and obstacles in the short but sensational life of India’s most famous stock market manipulator. From Shah’s modest beginnings to his meteoric rise on the Bombay bourse, the media attention to his runs-in with the law enforcement agencies,