I Conned Me  (English, Paperback, Sabyasachi Mishra)

Satya is a successful and ambitious young corporate professional with full of self belief. His ambitions make him move away from a low paying yet secure job environment into the world of corporate dogfights. Satya fights his battles winning a few and losing plenty. His lower middle class yet highly educated upbringing leaves his personality confused between professionalism and idealism. His recently inculcated ego of being a self made man from a humble background compounds his problems and makes him unable to think objectively and dispassionately in corporate dealings. He develops an attitude which is negative and nonconforming as his defense mechanism. Quickly he resorts to self pity.

His best friend who sympathies with him introduces him to a miracle worker and godman in his hometown in the hope that this person would be able to help Satya get over his problems in life. Satya gets some lucky breaks in his career and is convinced that they are due to the miracle worker. His belief in god and good which had helped him all his life and shaped his actions to be a good human being give way to anxiety and fear of losing what he has gained in life. Without realising Satya becomes an integral part of the same hypocrisy that he had loathed in the corporate.

His intelligence and fairness which had kept his head held high are replaced by a conniving and scheming nature using the same intelligence to gain power over others. His intellect however does not allow him to completely drift away from reason and he keeps on doubting the miracles logically. He embarks on a fact finding mission to expose the pitfalls of illogical faith and short cut solutions but is not able to achieve this in totality because of his greed. Satya displays multiple personalities as a result of this tug of war between logic, superstition, material enhancement and his intrinsic good nature. He gets into bigger and bigger problems which eventually turn out to be beyond his control and he loses the most important job in his career with little hope of ever making it back. He completely loses faith in himself and human kind and goes into a shell. He accuses the miracle worker of fraud but not himself of stupidity. He blames the corporate bosses of hypocrisy but does not introspect on his own choices made in life. He pities himself for his failures but does nothing to move on.

During this period of eventual unemployment a couple of chance incidents occur close to him which wakes him up. He is reminded of things which deep down in his mind he always knew as the key to joy and not always necessarily success. He is able to forgive people who have wronged him and forget about them. More importantly he forgives himself and attains his lost personality to a large extent. Satya settles down in life and prepares to move on to a new beginning.