The Stock Market Bull Is On My Heels

 “It’s not, like, fair.  All the guys from my class have, like, made heaps of money from crypto and investing in stocks in the last year.  The girls have been left out and are only now beginning to put money in….”  my 23-year old daughter complains  (this Gen says ‘like’ 224 times a day, plus/minus standard deviation of 30.  Even when they have a problem with someone they say, ‘I like dislike him’, which drives me, like, nuts).  

She continues “This investing, why is this, like, a guy thing?”  

“That’s because girls, including you, generally have much more common sense,” I counter.  Good strategy to apply praise with a butter-coated spoon, but lost on her.  Completely.

We are in a traffic jam, approaching an intersection and an argument (in reverse order).  I try to tell her that the stock market has been insanely over-valued for a long time and has now gone completely cuckoo (Cuculus canorus, if you are a micro-details bird-watcher with disdain for writers and other fungi).  “If the markets are crazily high and risky, how did these guys, like, make money?” she demands, and quite rightly so.

“Well, they could have lost too, because this is not investing, it’s gambling.”

“But they didn’t!  That’s the point!  And, like, K has made 12 lakhs this year…”

“Which bank did he rob?”

“Serious, Pa!”  

“Ok, tell me what he did then?”

“He lost in crypto, but has been, like, buying and selling shares in the last few months everyday.  He quit his job last month and four of them have taken up a flat where they, like, play video games all day and invest in stocks.”

“Correction.  They gamble in stocks.”

“HOW is it gambling if they are winning all the time?”

Well, she has a point there.  

“A crash is overdue and can happen, like, anytime.  Will you stop saying Like, it’s getting infectious.”

“Like, the crash last year?”

“No, that was like the pothole, like, on 9th Main.  This will be a big crash.”

“Like, when was it last?”

“Long ago, when you first got on to Harry Potter.  K is making a big big mistake by quitting his job.  I knew he was weak in the head, this confirms it.”

“At the moment, he is way richer than me, Papa!”

“That means Jacks**t and bull string.  It’s not real money, just the current value of his shares.”

She’s not understood what I said, so she changes the topic. Good thinking, I do the same (these things run in families). “Ok, so he’s agreed to, like, help me invest some money.”

“No.  Not invest, gamble. Plus, don’t do it.” Anti-Nike.

“Then, what should I do?”

“See if visas to Argentina are being issued now.  Backpack a month in Tierra del Fuego.”

“Pa! That doesn’t make any sense.”

Another argument lost.  It’s time to ask that driver in front if he has any idea how important I am.

The Mammoth from Mannuthy

The only useful thing I learnt last week was that, thirty years ago, a chap from the Vet College in Mannuthy in Kerala changed the course of inter-disciplinary science by developing a mathematical formula to calculate -hold your breath, no, not breadth, I said breath - the surface area of the elephant.

You read that right.

He had been trying to solve Fermat’s Last theorem and, in the haze induced by that process, decided that the best way to do so would be to ask an elephant to lie flat on a carpet (“Stay still, Jumbo”), while he took out his tailoring tape. 

I just made this up, sorry.  

Apparently, he used the least-squares method – whatever that is (and may mathematics and its mother-in-law never torment my life again).  From all accounts of this method that I looked up online written in (reasonably) lucid English, it does not involve drawing the largest possible squares on parts of the elephant. If it did, any elephant with self-respecting nerve endings would be tickled to bits, each such bit including the remains of an erstwhile researcher as well. 

So, the question that now haunts you no doubt (and for which you continue to hold your breath – it’s getting dangerous, so think of roses) is: why did this genius, this doyen, this man-of-substance, this Einstein-of-Mannuthy do this?  (All this talk of haze and substance is controversial.  Curb the urge.)

Well, he was sipping his naadan chaya one day, when he saw a mahout struggle to climb his charge and it struck him (no, the elephant did not strike him, that would have been the end of the research using the least-square method) that all he had to do was to give the mahout a formula.  (A mahout who knows elephant-surface-area climbs easy.  Old Jungle Saying).

Sorry, I just made that story up again. 

The most notable feature of the task was that they even measured the elephant’s tail, missing no detail however slight (Sherlock H, not me). The tail was considered – for the formula – to be a cylinder, which, if you stretch your imagination with chewing gum and a rubber band coated in coconut oil, it is.  But, if the elephant’s tail is a cylinder, what is its leg, a parallelogram? (this qualifies him right away for a senior job in the Forest Department in some states in India, because that is how they count tigers). 

Finally, he calculated the areas of about 13 parts of 24 elephants (this can only be done in Kerala, one must emphasise; if you try this in Bandipur, there will be 13 parts of yours with 24 elephants, but, in serious matters of reporting facts, one should not digress).  Once that was done, he did some nifty correlation and then declared, in the spirit of Darwin, Wallace, and other luminaries who preceded him, that the formula only needed the elephant’s height and its forefoot pad circumference, both of which, of course, the said elephant is always ready to provide when (politely) asked.  Every elephant, be assured, is salivating to know its surface area.  

But, being the damp squib that I am, I have a problem with this research.  What you need to worry about with an elephant - trust me - is not its surface area, but its volume.  

And, therein, lies a tale (no, not cylindrical).

You will never have the measure of me.

The Poker Table Called Farming

Often, a photo hides far more than it reveals.  
These flowers – white chrysanthemums –  are pretty to the eye and, as I walk past fields filled with them, farmers – more women than men – are hard at work, plucking them in time for the Ganesha festival that could fetch them decent returns.  Some have – to use a metaphor entirely out of place – missed the boat, for their plants are yet to flower and, if that happens before Dassehra, the crop falls between two stools (another metaphor out of place, you point out?).  It will then fetch just a modest return which belies the effort that has gone in.  Hard work, investment in saplings, labour and pesticides and risks to each individual who sprays these toxic cocktails, a risk these farmers accept as punishment and perdition. 

This flowering field is their poker table.

What is missing in this picture is the crop that should rightfully be growing in this season.  Ragi.  

An economist will argue, from his armchair, that this is the way markets work.  I will argue, in turn, that he, like most armchair economists, should go to hell. I am a hobby economist, so I guess I can pass judgement without indicting myself.

The story is familiar: the price of ragi collapsed at the time of harvest this January and has inched back to about Rs 25 a kilo.  At that price, the few farmers who grow an acre of ragi will make a return of around Rs 8000 in six months – the family pitches in with labour (that is not added in the calc) and the male farmer spends two cold winter months guarding the crop at night from a machan on a tree (which is why we have some big trees left), for elephants and wild boar will visit with food on their mind.  

The Minimum Support Price for ragi is close to Rs 34 a kilo, but the TN Government has never bought ragi from farmers.  Never.

So, these farmers – call them the Last Resistance - grow ragi for their daily mudde, and for the stalk that is fed to cattle: milk provides them their weekly cash flow and insurance. The surplus ragi – heaps of it – is sold to middlemen, often to repay a debt.  
Ragi is a perfect crop: hardy, with minimal irrigation needs, no pesticide and sparse fertiliser, if any.  As nutrition, it cannot get better.  Much of this is true for all our millets, each of which is now, in the hyperbolic symbolism used by modern day dieticians, a Super-Food.

Try telling a farmer this, when he gets twenty five bucks a kilo. 
.…and, oh, lest I forget, on Flipkart, ragi flour sells for between Rs 90 and Rs 200 a kilo.

Make a difference: buy ragi from the family that grows it or a farmers’ collective, at market price.  
And do take their photo, for they are heroes, no less.

A Sozzled Cook and a Guest who came to dinner

 When Sanjiv Handique posted this fetching, beautiful painting of an old little home in Digboi, the town he and I grew up in, my heart skipped a beat and an old story – one I grew up with – returned.  

Mum and dad lived in an identical home a stone’s throw away from this one, just after their wedding in the mid-1950s, when mum was a nervous eighteen and dad at the first rung of his accounting ladder.  A large central room with a fireplace, which was what the Brits gathered around in those chilly winter evenings, a bedroom each on either side and a pantry - dry kitchen of sorts- at the back.  The kitchen was well behind the house – the small building at the back in the painting - and had a paved covered path leading to it (this is crucial for the story that follows, so, as Rajni would say, Mind it).
 
The bungalow was surrounded by evergreen jungle, a rich, wet forest of an explorer’s dreams.  Dark, forbidding, terrifying mass of green, is how mum saw it, so she awaited dad’s return from office every day and wouldn’t walk beyond the garden (gardening, hence, became a lifelong passion).  They had an old loyal cook, Pillai, who, after his day’s cooking was done, would retreat to his quarters and knock off a couple of pegs of his ‘braandy’ before heading back to lay the table for dinner (these were Brit days.  Mind it).
 
One evening, mum was startled to see Pillai’s sozzled face pressed against the closed glass window outside; he had a look of a man who had seen a nasty, unfriendly ghost and he was gesturing wildly, but could not speak.  Should she let him in? When he looked like he was about to faint, she opened the door with trepidation and he rushed in and dropped to the floor in fright, gesturing to the back of the house.
 
When mum hurried to the pantry and looked out of the window, she stood frozen: resting on the paved path to the kitchen was a large tigress with three cubs. Mum stood there, in a daze, staring in fascination as the cubs played around, while the tigress watched on – I am told – in amusement (an amused tiger is something you have not heard of.  It endorses mum’s storytelling capability).  She did not seem to mind being ogled at by a dumbstruck human and was in no hurry to leave.

 
A while later, there was the sound of a Fiat (1100, that quaint old car) driving up the road to the Bungalow – dad was returning home.  The tigress got up and the family – mom and cubs - walked over behind the kitchen.  Mum saw her take a short jump over the little drain and then wait for the cubs to do so.  A moment later, they were gone.
The guest left behind a story that would traverse seven decades, a hundred re-tellings, much embellishment and a deep family nostalgia for a fairytale world that had once been.  

 
And, yes, Pillai turned teetotaller for good.

The Over-Achiever Bias

 Humans were never genetically altered to over-achieve.

The rarefied class of those we call over-achievers – people who, by general consensus, have done more than anyone (or the vast majority) could – is one that I am familiar with.  In this layer of the atmosphere of  achievement, I have met many in the thirty-two years since 1989, but no one I have met – not one – has been compassionate or outward-focused or unhurried or caring in a way that would make them humane.  Or a good listener (but, that shortfall, as you know, does not limit itself to over-achievers).  

Every one of the overachievers I know has been egocentric, stressed because he (or she) was unkind to himself or herself and to others, engendering conflict in the process, and self-focused to the point of ignoring the basis of our genetic heritage of a hundred thousand years: sociality and community bonding, that the tribal societies we now consider primitive prioritised above all else.  The language and actions of the modern day overachiever, even when they do yoga to ‘de-tox’ or set goals of weight-loss, are  aligned to a self-centric compelling desire for overachievement that is as incomprehensible as it is unreal and damaging.  Or take the running of a marathon: some – very few of the many runners I know – are the natural marathoners who run for the joy of running and would stop when they choose, to laugh with a child, or greet a friend on the road and shoot the breeze.  Most run because it gives them validation of some sort; they are in competition mode with themselves or others and conviviality is an unaffordable distraction.   

When you read the motivational spiels about achieving your true achievement-potential, have you thought of just what that means?  If you have, and if that thought has resulted in an answer, I would be grateful for the clarity, for I have – I really mean this - no idea of what a human’s potential is; we can measure it for a vehicle based on its horsepower and torque and for the boiling point of water, but for a human?  It is not the desire to create the next best app or a cool electric car – that, as Elon Musk demonstrates in his behaviour vividly, is egocentrism at its zenith and leaves in its wake the usual collateral damage that today’s businesses see within: team members running hard to stay in the same place and using meaningless, trite language to seek affiliation to a peer group, extraordinary variations in pay and inequality in society that engender trepidation, neglect, jealousy and retaliation, the creation of an utterly fake public persona by equally stressed PR folks who are asked to transform a beast into a butterfly in the media and the endless desire to seek validation and praise from everyone, as a billion posts on Linkedin demonstrate. 

This made me often wonder, when I was in my thirties, if I was built differently (and wrongly) and hence, if there was a need to course-correct and try to achieve more.

I now know better.

The people I know to be overachievers have used phrases like, “We must work hard and play hard” or “Conflict is inevitable” and are glued to entirely fictional tokens of perceived excellence with convenient logos that include the now-familiar ‘stretch goals’ ideology, all of which repel those who hear them (that includes me!) and seek to divide rather than unite.  Competition of this sort and with this attitude bears a cost that society, and now the planet, is unable to bear.

The only goal post that we need to see everyday and to aspire to reach is to be happy with oneself: at times, this results in achievement of the kind that is recognised as such, but for most part this itself is the achievement, for its own sake .  It takes, as a dear friend of mine once said, very little to be happy.  Yet, it is a goal post that seems to recede into the distance as the chimera of cheers keeps the castle aloft in the sky. 

The real mirror before us shows no chimera, so let us listen to ourselves while in front of it.  Time has never been our enemy and let us not make it one.

Money In The Exit

 

B for Absent-Minded

 Sandy B was the most – THE most – absent-minded person in our batch at IIMB.  Today, he is a prof in the US, which is appropriate placement for that absent-mindedness (as distinguished from his brain, which is formidable and has awed me no end).

Sandy B was my neighbour in the hostel, so I saw a lot of him.  I mean this literally because he often forgot to wear all his clothes or remembered to wear but forgot where those clothes were.  He would emerge from his room that had last seen any attempt at organisation around the time of the Chola kingdom with a loopy apologetic smile which - given the sore sight he presented – was necessary to mollify viewers, even those in our close circle who were inured to the spectacle.  He could never remember if he had had a bath and would then employ some utterly questionable methods (on which I shall not dwell) to determine the answer.

He had heard of exercise as being a human activity, but never thought of it as something that was applicable to him (from more recent photos of his, it appears that there has been an education).  In stout (and, how did this pun get here?) defence of the generous adipose around his tummy, he would quote Obelix, “My chest has slipped a bit…” with an endearing grin, which then got two other worthies, Santy and Sampy (no, they weren’t twins), to jiggle his belly a bit. 

The other part of him that interested the citizens of Bangalore were his hands. If you asked him for directions to somewhere, his hands would come to life and twist and turn in impossible ways, until you recognised that you were dealing with a Superior Talent and chose to figure out the route yourself (stuff like Google Maps has made our life immensely boring and I am all for banning it). 
ps: his dad forbade him from using his car, for which, of course, the larger populace of our city is immensely grateful. 

Sometimes he would sing (in a fetching voice with the superior talent that Bongs – including those who walk around modestly clothed – possess), but while singing, the arms would move and his fingers would keep the voice company, twisting and turning in scale progression, his head nodding away, the eyes with a far away look. This was because he thought he was on stage. On other occasions, he would speak to himself with a puzzled expression, saying, “Now, how did that happen?”, with his forefinger on his chin and a look of surprise, while surveying the fifteen others who were clutching their bellies (not his, for a change) and grinning away.    

Of course, if there were any assignments to be done, Sandy B had forgotten all about them immediately after.  To prevent that, he decided to make it a point to write them down diligently.  He would then misplace that book.  But, in his support, he never forgot to ask us to inform him of where he had misplaced the book that would remind him of the assignment.  So there. 

But the best stories were (and, probably, still are) of his travels, for he seems to reserve that raw talent for the larger world.  We learned from his engineering batchmates about his train journeys to and from Bangalore and the general impression was that miracles do happen, else he should have been an illegal immigrant in Colombia.  Once, we were told, he exchanged his second-class berth for an army man’s first-class one, because the fauji wanted to be with friends.  Later that night, of course, he got himself into hot water when the ticket examiner came around: absent-mindedly, he fished out his ID card and then tried, in vain, to convince a stern, disapproving, unbelieving ticket examiner that he had done no impersonation. The experience, in the words of our stellar representative of the human race was, ‘harrowing’. 

The next time we meet, if he remembers the place and the time and fetches up, I shall have to put my forefinger on the chin and say, “Now, how did that happen?”