Lalit Modi Reveals He Cheated To Pass SAT And Study In US: "I Got 1560 On 1600"

Lalit Modi, IPL's first chairman, left India in 2010 amid investigations into tax evasion and money-laundering. He has been abroad since then. In 2013, the Indian board banned him for life after finding him guilty of the charges. Recently, in an interview with former Australia captain Michael Clarke, Modi revealed he was a rule-breaker from the beginning. “I was born with a diamond spoon. Not a silver spoon, not a gold spoon, but with a diamond spoon. And so I always grew up having everything. I went to boarding school at the age of five. It was tough. I went to seven different boarding schools, by the way,” Modi told Clarke in the podcast.

“It was very tough. My grandfather was very strict. My father was very strict. I came up with a very strict upbringing.”

He added that he had someone else give the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), a standardised exam used for undergraduate college admissions in the United States. He got into every college he says.

“I was always the black sheep of the family and I always broke every rule in the book because I always wanted more and more and more. It wasn't easy, you know? I went to seven different schools. I finally ended up in Delhi and I flunked the 12th exam. But I fudged myself because I wanted to go to America, because I wanted to go there and party. I had to get into college. And I got into every college. Somebody did my SATs for me. I got 1560 on 1600. It was my name and his picture. We got away with it in those days. You can't today. When I went to college again I went to a place in North Carolina called Duke University. I was probably one of the very few Indians that were there and I never lived away from home as such outside the country. I was in boarding school so I knew how to make my bed. I knew how to live and look after myself from the age of five. But what made a difference was you went from a world in India to a totally developed first world America,” Modi added

Modi added while in college he would be asked if in India, people used bullock carts rather than cars.

“I got used to that, being picked on. I wasn't very well built. I had to fend for myself and I didn't have bodyguards and things like that in those days. So best thing was just give in and look the other way and move on and that taught me a lot,” he said.

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