Rishi Uncut
Nobody should ever feel that bad for Industry’s Rishi Ramdani. The retrograde Pierpoint trader played by Sagar Radia is perhaps the most overtly repulsive individual in an office already suffering from a workplace-culture problem. He’s a bully and a misogynist, a sentient HR violation screaming ceaselessly at his colleagues in the heat of a trade. Yet “White Mischief,” which sees Industry doing an enthusiastic Uncut Gems homage, tries its darndest to get you to feel a glimmer of sympathy for the guy. The pugnacious Rishi might be “the ghost of Margaret Thatcher in a handsome Asian man,” as Eric Tao calls him in the episode, but he’s still an Asian dude, and there’s a rich and twisty perversion to how the series considers this detail. In many ways, Rishi represents the most acute expression of Industry’s bone-dry view on the universe: His ethnic background might make him an underdog on paper, but he’s still a noxious asshole.
To this point, Rishi has mostly functioned as a kind of acid comic relief, with his bulldog disposition and offhand quips — “How am I supposed to know that chrysanthemums are the flower of death? I’m now long ten grand on chrysanthemums!” — elevating him to a fan favorite among Industry-heads. “White Mischief” presents the first extended look at the character months after his wedding to Diana (Brittany Ashworth), which anchored the second-season finale. It’s Christmastime, and he’s bought property in the countryside. The land includes a cricket hall of local renown complete with a “founders’ wall” filled with photos of old white men who meant something to the place, a feature Rishi sweatily reassures his neighbors will be preserved during the renovation. By many measures, Rishi appears to have all the trappings of a made man: country house, wife, kid, flashy car. He’s also pretty much the same person at home as he is at Pierpoint. One of the very first shots of him in this milieu sees Rishi using a urinal while watching an OnlyFans video made by his colleague Sweetpea Golightly. As he’s titillated, the camera tilts to reveal his newborn slung across his chest. Rishi’s nose immediately bleeds on the baby’s head due to all the coke he’s been sniffing.
Rishi’s country life is an uneasy state of affairs. An old fling of Diana whose family used to own the property lingers in the periphery, even popping up early in the morning to trim Rishi’s hedges; Rishi feels his masculinity threatened by this overly familiar white man. While out at night, a groundskeeper mistakes him and an associate for trespassers on account of their race. But microaggressions aren’t Rishi’s only problems. He’s several hundred grand in debt and owes a bunch of money to a shady character, so he’s making a huge bet on the British pound at Pierpoint — potentially jeopardizing the firm’s stability — while simultaneously slipping into the throes of a gambling addiction as he tries to roulette his way into positive cash flow. Also, his stresses are physically manifesting as bleeding red welts on his back. So yeah, lots going on. Radia is fantastic in this role, his charisma never faltering despite all the chaos he sows, and as the episode’s criss-cross editing ramps up to depict his spiral into addiction, your own neck strains as he barrels from one self-defeating situation to the next. Cue the Oneohtrix Point Never.
Watching Industry lean so hard into Rishi’s odiousness is thrilling. Perhaps we’ve arrived at the endpoint of Hollywood representation politics: You know Asians have made it when we get to be disgusting, coke-snorting, sexually harassing new fathers on Western television. I’m mostly being glib here, but it’s also not not true: Rishi as a character feels true to life in a way that film and television rarely depict when it comes to people of color. I knew more than a few Asian kids like him in college — eager to make a killing in finance or big tech, abrasive in their pursuits, uninterested in the amorality of the profession — but it’s challenging to critique their choices out loud. There’s always a plausible reason to justify their participation in the cesspool of high-finance: They need the money, why should white people monopolize such opportunity and power, etc., etc.
The particular spark of Industry is how it’s constantly questioning whether those reasons are enough. Harper (Myha’la Herrold) is a Black American woman “from a shitty university” and a fractured family; does that justify her willingness to burn everyone else in her desire to “win”? Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is a nepo baby burdened with severe daddy issues; does that excuse her from not questioning the source of her wealth? Robert (Harry Lawtey) may be white, but he’s a working-class kid (with mommy issues) from the north; is this reason enough for him to court the trappings of the white upper class? It’s not for nothing that many of the young guns who begin doubting the system, like Gus (David Jonsson), have since left Pierpoint, and the show, altogether. By the time you arrive at Eric, now a partner at the firm, you’re looking at someone so hollowed out by the job he barely exists beyond it.
As a more senior member of the trading floor, Rishi is closer to Eric than Harper in the sale of his soul, but you can still see Industry playing around with the tension in his character. He’s a South Asian native to the United Kingdom whom we can infer grew up beneath the weight of the country’s colonial history. He also suffers from a potent gambling addiction. Are those reasons enough for the viewer to sympathize with him? Of course, the foregrounding of such questions is a continuation of a project that stems to the earliest days of the TV anti-hero: Does Walter White getting cancer justify his creation of a criminal empire? Here, Industry refashions the project to probe at the more delicate relationship between underdog identities and participation in a deeply questionable system. (It’s worth noting that the show’s creators, Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, are themselves children of Polish and Ghanaian immigrants respectively.)
It is to Industry’s credit that the show rarely articulates the racial politics of its characters, instead keeping the dynamic at arm’s length. “Don’t you think people underestimate you?” Harper says to Rishi in season two as they do lines in the bathroom. She prefaces this by commenting that he doesn’t seem like the kind of person who takes a moment to think about his “identity.” Though she doesn’t say it outright, she means his race. “Nuh, that sounds tiring,” he says, inhaling powder. “Not when you’re printin’ biz. When you’re printin’ biz, it doesn’t matter.” We don’t get many moments like this in Industry, but when we do, they illustrate how the people in this system usually choose to sublimate their identities for wealth and power.
At the end of the day, Rishi averts disaster. For now, at least. He might’ve gone on tilt and gambled away his roulette winnings, but his big Pierpoint bet works out, and whatever illusion he’s built for himself of being able to sustain his engine holds for one more day. “White Mischief” ends on a triumphant note for the character as he takes a bat to the cricket house and smashes the “founders’ wall” to bits, flipping off the white establishment that encroaches upon him. The final shot settles on him smiling in the morning sun, convinced of his underdog status in the world. For now, Rishi has enough reason to keep going like this.