Furquan Moharkan (Batch-2011) is a business journalist with eight years of experience and a best-selling author. He has extensively covered India’s debt market crisis, banking crisis and the fall of Yes Bank. But his career trajectory was not as vertical as one would like to assume.
His ability to crunch numbers as a BBA graduate in finance was never in doubt, and set him up well for his career. He started off in the corporate sector with a high paying, lucrative job as an Investment Banker with UBS AG. After a year in investment banking industry, he realized a drift from it. “I felt that, in a corporate structure, machines drive the man — which should have been the opposite, in normal circumstances”. Furquan made a drastic change in his career path. In 2015, Furquan gave up his stable, high-paying job to his long-lost love for journalism.
“I started cold calling and cold mailing the editors about the job opportunity. Then after two months of joblessness, Deccan Herald happened: even though I had to take almost 50% salary cut, yet it was gracious of Deccan Herald to hire a person with no journalism background.” But changing the career path was not a cakewalk. In his initial days at newsroom, Furquan struggled with content writing, generating ideas and the means of realising them. Amid this struggling phase, Furquan met his Journalism Guru and mentor Mr. BS Arun, the Deputy Editor of Deccan Herald, who happened to be the right person-right time for Furquan. He handheld him in journalism — from giving him ideas to rewriting the copies even on his off days, he mentored Furquan with everything.
The General Election of 2019 marked the turning point of Furquan’s career. He notes “I remember rolling out three stories before the election — on huge lay-offs being planned in BSNL, on government eyeing RBI reserves and severe cash crunch at HAL. These three stories became the rallying point of the General Election 2019, as opposition cornered the government over these issues. As soon as the elections were over, after months of investigation, I released a story on the severe cash crunch at YES Bank”. Facing legal threats from the bank’s then management, Furquan stood by his story — a story that reflected the rot that was there in the glittering success story. After a series of stories, months later, in March 2020, when India faced its biggest banking failure in history and YES Bank collapsed, Penguin Random House India approached Furquan to write a book. This was when the pandemic sent the world for a toss. This gave Furquan enough time to work on his first manuscript of the book and in a span of just three months, he had already finished it. The book “The Banker Who Crushed His Diamonds: The Yes Bank Story” was officially released in February 2021 and much to everyone’s expectations, it became an instant best-seller. Within two months of its release, Furquan signed a deal with Almighty Motion Pictures for the movie rights of the financial thriller. The crisp page-turner will now be adapted for screen.
Furquan looks back fondly on his years at DPS Srinagar. “I am thankful for my School and many teachers and friends. Here we have studied, learned and had lots of fun together. The years at School turned out to be very fruitful for me. I love everything about my School where the building blocks of my life were laid and I owe a great deal to it”. With a desire to “speak what I want and express what I think and view,” Furquan plans to create more touching stories for his readers. He currently works at Staff Writer in The Morning Context.
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