It is considered a sin or a serious transgression to make a promise you cannot fulfil. This applies to promises made to both God and people. Breaking a promise, especially a solemn one, is seen as a violation of trust and integrity. That is what President Droupadi Murmu to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to industrialist Mukesh Ambani to journalist Rajdeep Sardesai have been doing for the last few months.

You may wonder what I am talking about. If you are a senior citizen with a Facebook account, you would have seen videos of all the big shots of the establishment, including Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, industrialists GM Birla and Anand Mahindra, and Google man Sundar Pichai introducing a wonderful investment project, "initiated by the Government" to transform the lives of people.

Among them, Finance Minister Sitharaman is the one who has been making the maximum video appeals. In every video, she is attired in a new sari, but her voice is as stentorian as she tries to silence Rahul Gandhi in Parliament. Of course, I have noticed one thing jarring about her statements. She claims the investment platform was created by the Ministry of Economics, but the fact is, there is no such ministry.

What she heads is the Ministry of Finance, under which there is a Department of Economic Affairs. However, Modi in his video clearly mentions the Ministry of Finance. I checked with two young people who have a Facebook presence, but they have not seen these "announcements." So, I presume that the announcements are targeted at senior citizens.

Anyway, let me tell you in brief what these announcements say. Modi has quoted a huge sum of money in US dollars that the government has invested to give a stupendous investment opportunity to millions of people. Unfortunately, they are not available to one and all. Only those who watch the announcement on social media at a particular time can enrol for it. They have to scroll down and visit the website.

What they all promise is that the investor need not be a rich person. They may not know anything about trading. But the government has set in place a robust system that takes into account the immense possibilities of Artificial Intelligence. It appeals to people, especially retired people, who have some investments which are not enough to give a substantial return to lead a comfortable life.

When it comes to expectations, not even the sky is the limit. The scheme has been tailored to suit the needs of such people. To put it in a nutshell, all that one has to do is invest ?21,000. It will give a monthly return of ?17 lakh.

India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has gone one step ahead. He says that if anyone does not get the promised millions, he will give ?80 lakh from "his own pocket." The finance minister also makes some such promises. Unlike Ambani, she did not make any promise of compensating the loser with her own money.

At this juncture, a correction needs to be made. I saw this morning another video where Nirmala Sitharaman wants people to invest ?22,000, instead of ?21,000 until yesterday. She also says that this scheme is not for all, but only for those who click on the website. She appears on a popular news channel, which claims to be the largest-viewed English channel in the country.

I have also seen announcements that already 1.47 lakh people have joined the scheme. Even if all of them invested only ?21,000 per person, the total comes to a tidy sum. I am a reasonably educated person, though I have near-zero knowledge of how stock exchanges work. Also, I have a disdain for trading. While I was with the Indian Express, we had a typist. He was a bachelor and a Jain by faith. He never took leave.

He was the first to arrive at the office and the last to leave. He would have all his meals at the Express canteen or the eating joints around the office. He spent most of his daytime checking how his investments were faring in the Stock Exchange.

On certain days, he was happy and on certain other days, he was glum. He never saw a film, went on a pleasure trip, or had a nice meal at a good restaurant. Every year, he went to his sister's house for a meal on a festival day. He would tell us all how tasty the food was. Jain died, and I attended his cremation at Nigambodh in Delhi. I wondered who ultimately benefited from his investments in stocks.

Trading never attracted me. In fact, I did not even consider it a profession. In the nineties, there was a wizard in the stock exchange business. He was Harshad Mehta. I had heard young people say that he was their role model. He made millions every day by trading in shares. I was convinced that my approach to trading was right when Mehta was arrested for some fraud. I believed that billions of dollars did not matter if its owner was to live in a prison in the company of pickpockets, drug addicts, pedophiles and pimps.

In fact, I believe in the Biblical dictum: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken." Common sense also dictated that, whatever the business, one cannot earn ?17 lakh in one month scrupulously. I also know that under the Ponzi scheme, one can make a lot of money. Let me explain what it is:

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment scheme that uses money from new investors to pay returns to earlier investors, creating the illusion of a profitable business. The scheme relies on a constant flow of new investors and collapses when it becomes difficult to recruit more or when a large group of investors demand their money back.

That is why Ponzi schemes are banned in India. In the 2014 elections, Narendra Modi promised to have at least ?15 lakh deposited into the accounts of every Indian. No, it was not by printing new currency notes in large quantities. He said trillions of Indian rupees were stashed away in foreign banks, and he would bring all such money if he were given power.

After the elections, Home Minister Amit Shah admitted that the promise was not real but a "Joomla," not to be implemented. This time, the promise is much more — millions of rupees every month.

To carry conviction with the masses, there was a video clip in which Rajdeep Sardesai was seen reporting that "tens of thousands of young people above the age of 40," were quitting their steady jobs to join the government-approved scheme which requires an investment of only ?21,000 and no special knowledge about the volatility of the stock market. Some other TV anchors were also deployed to spread such reports.

My young friend, who has some knowledge of share business, told me that they were all "deep fake" videos. I told him that a few years ago, when a girl student in Mumbai just "liked" a Facebook post that questioned the rationale of the amendment to the citizenship law, she was immediately arrested. How could deep fake videos of the President, the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister be used for so long to solicit funds? He had no answer to this.

When PayTM introduced itself to the people through Full Page 1 advertisements, it used Modi's picture prominently. I wondered how he allowed a private enterprise to misuse his photograph. His narcissism was evident when I received a Diary and Year Planner, brought out by an NGO. The diary had 409 pictures of Modi, besides his biographical details featuring all the prizes he won.

Since nobody was able to give me an idea of how Nirmala Sitharaman's scheme worked, I decided to take the risk and deposit ?21,000. After an hour or so of my clicking, a female voice welcomed me to the scheme introduced by the Finance Minister and tailored for the benefit of people like me. She promised to help me navigate the process.

First, I had to answer some questions which would reveal whether the person had some knowledge of trading in foreign exchanges, commodities and stocks. After that, I had to give many documents to become a registered investor or trader in the company, which was incorporated in a small island in the Indian Ocean with a total population of less than 35,000 people.

What I noticed was that she had enormous patience to deal with a slow learner like me. I even wondered whether she was a human being or an AI person. I thought it imprudent to ask her whether she was real or a deepfake.

She had, in the meantime, ensured that I deposited $250 with the company. It came to a little over ?23,000. She told me that I have a dedicated financial advisor who will help me start a new career in trading. As promised, the man came online and invited me to a Zoom meeting. It was obvious that he could see the screen of my iPad.

He helped me open my account with the company. At the top, it was written "Equity," and it showed the figure $250. He taught me certain basic things about trading. It was quite educative. I had also got into the mood for trading. He advised me that the safest for a beginner like me was to invest in currency. On his advice, I invested one dollar each in four currencies.

He also explained that if one investment did not give a return, the others might. And if three of them failed to give me a profit, the fourth one would not disappoint me. It was a Thursday and I went to sleep in the snug belief the President, the PM and the FM instilled in me — that I was on the way to becoming a millionaire.

Early on Friday morning, I received a statement from the company giving the status of my investment. All my dreams of having a million-rupee-worth of dollars in my account evaporated into thin air. All four investments gave a negative return. In simple terms, I made a loss. When my advisor came online, he was as usual cheerful. After all, it was I who lost money, not him.

I asked him point-blank, and he told me that he was as human as I am. He was from Uttar Pradesh but settled in London. We decided to meet when he came to India next. With regard to business, he told me that $250 was too small a sum to invest in foreign exchange or commodities like oil and gold. He then told me about the 30:70 ratio. If I had $10,000 in my account, I could invest $3000. This way I would not become bankrupt even if all the $3000 invested was lost.

At that point, I told him that I was not interested in continuing and would like to withdraw. He was sorry to hear that, but told me that I could withdraw the money from my account. The next day, a person from Srinagar with a Hindu name living in London told me that he would thereafter guide me. He did some calculations and invested my money "wisely." I asked him how I could make my millions.

He showed the listed price of gold, which was $3000+. Then he guided me to a projection by JP Morgan under which gold will touch $4000+ in six months' time. As he told me how I could earn my millions, I remembered someone telling me that instead of buying books from Amazon some 20 years ago, if I had invested the money in its shares, I would have been a richer person today.

As I write this, a week after my trading life began, my equity has fallen from $250 to $213. This is what I earned by trusting the Finance Minister. If this is not a scam, India has redefined the meaning of fraud.