Value of Money - 2

Being Sadness totally sucked.

But as is the case with everything else, I gradually got used to it. The bride, who everyone called Chunni, alternated her days between the extremes of laughter and crying. During the daytime, she seemed positively delirious, especially after she took a light-brown potion and ran around the room with other brides, pulling their hair, or painting each other’s face with bright shades of colours. And when night came, she transformed completely into the sad creature that I had first seen, as new grooms came and went, sometimes bursting into tears.

However, among the numerous grooms, there was this one guy I had come to like. He was the one who called her Radhika, not Chunni. His clothes were usually torn when he entered, but they rarely engaged in the bride-groom routine. Instead, they talked on and on, way after night had passed. He was the only groom with whom I saw her smile, and sometimes even laugh a little. I enjoyed that a lot. For the next 5-6 years maybe (I keep losing track of time), life continued in this vein. And all through this time, I had also come to like her presence. So whenever I saw the moroseness in her eyes I blamed myself for it. She didn’t deserve me. Seriously, being Sadness totally sucked.

I remember it was an unusually quiet night when the monotony of my observations was disturbed. The groom who called her Radhika, burst into our room gasping for breath and had an agitated discussion where I could only catch a few snatches like “Tonight’s our only chance! Raghu is out of town. There’s hardly any security tonight.” “But they’ll kill you!” “I don’t care. Seeing you here everyday is anyways worse than death.” They hurriedly packed up and left, with me lying forgotten in her tattered purse, thinking “Finally! Without me she won’t have Sadness!” But in no more than 2 minutes, she rushed back into the room, grasped me and ran. “Why did you have to go back?”, asked the groom, walking briskly. “Arre baba! I couldn’t leave our ticket to freedom behind now, could I?”, she replied putting me in his hand. And then they ran and ran and ran.

 The Last I saw of Chunni

I felt a huge weight being lifted off my mind. Apparently, I wasn’t Sadness. I was a Ticket to Freedom!

“2 tickets for first train to Bishnupur. Sleeper”, said the groom handing me to an unknown giant, before disappearing into the crowd with his giggling bride. The new giant kept me in a wooden drawer where I spent the next few days, before being shifted to a place with an uncanny resemblance to where I first gained consciousness – A building I came to know as a bank.

I was pleased to see many of my second and third cousins there. Some looked as good as I remembered them, while others had gaping holes in their body. As for me, I had creased a lot more than when I started and had a few stains here and there, but was still much better than many of my cousins. The next year or so continued there, as we kept talking about each other’s experiences so far. What I found curious was that even though each of us looked identical, we all had a different idea of what we were. Some said they were Happiness, some claimed to be Power, some believed themselves to be Gratitude, while others thought they were Evil. For my part, I was convinced I was a glorious Ticket to Freedom.

Life at the bank can get really boring. Within a couple of months, my twins had started repeating their stories, and some had exaggerated theirs beyond recognition from the original versions. So I was pleased when I felt the sensation of being lifted again. A Ticket to Freedom deserved to be out there freeing people, not sitting in a bank listening to wild exaggerations. I hoped it was Manchanda Ji again. I longed to see the first bride and groom I had known. This time, however, it was a much quieter and more impressive looking giant who carried me. He put me in a large case with many other cousins.

I spent a couple of days with him in the case, before I again saw light. The case was opened in a large room, with 2 additional giants, one sitting and one standing, peering over us. The giant who was standing took all of us out, and started counting 1,2,3,…. It went on and on to 10,000 and then 20,000 and then 50,000. And I thought “Wow! There’s 50,000 Tickets to Freedom right here! I wonder how many brides will be freed today.”

“That’s OK. The money is all here. The water will be diverted to your plant in the next 6 months”, said the sitting giant, dressed all in white, to the case owner. He smiled and left us there. The bulky, sitting giant told the standing one to take the case while he took a couple of bundles in his pocket. I happened to be in one of those bundles. The next few days were spent understanding the routine of my new giant, who people called Subhash Babu. His routine was similar to bride I had spent my earlier time with, but his mood was the exact opposite.

While he used to cry in the morning after having his light-brown potion, he guffawed loudly at nights as a number of brides visited him to play the bride-groom game. In its ugliness, it was no different than Chunni’s nightly ritual. 6-7 months went by like this, when one day something dramatic happened. As Subhash Babu was taking his usual early morning walk surrounded by other fat giants, from nowhere a very thin, frail creature, barely covered in a dirty rag, with grey matted hair appeared before us. But more than the frame of the creature, the most striking feature were its eyes, red with boiling rage. Without so much as a warning, it landed a resonating slap on the Subhash Babu’s fat cheek, who fell to the ground in shock.

“YOU MONSTROUS BASTARD!”, it shrieked in a voice cracking with uncontrolled fury. “Your greed has wiped out our entire village! Now all that’s left there are rotting dead bodies and vultures! AND FOR WHAT?! THIS!” it screamed as it snatched me out of his pocket. The whole procession was stunned into inaction as she spat on me and threw me back at his face. It took a moment before the entire procession returned to its senses, grabbed the creature’s frail body and started raining blows and kicks on it. A couple of others put me back in the Subhash Babu’s pocket and escorted him away from it.

As we were leaving, the last words I heard from the creature were “Death! That is what all your greed and all your money has meant to us! And Death is what you will get one day, you bastard! One that will be a thousand times more miserable than the ones you resigned us to…”

Well, time proved the creature right. I must admit that Subhash Babu did meet the most miserable death any being could possibly get. But right at that moment, my biggest concern was this new identity that the creature had bestowed on me.

Death!

(To be continued)

Value of Money - 1

As I rest here behind a glass frame, with people occasionally glancing over me with curious interest, I realize my frequency of slipping into nostalgia has increased alarmingly. But it’s not my fault either. When you’re 120 years old and have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no fresh air to feel, the lines between yesterday, today and tomorrow are bound to blur. 120 years is a lot more than most of my 5,00,000 odd identical twins got to see, as many of them burnt, or rotted, or drenched, or got torn, or lost, or were devoured by termites and rodents. There are many forms of demise that my kind is likely to meet. But as luck would have it, I survived all of these to land up here at a place called Jaipur Museum, with a plaque below my glass frame engraved with precise information.

50 Rupees Currency Note,

Government of India,

1991.

1991. It seems such a long time ago, when I first gained consciousness lying flat between 2 of my twins. We spent the first few days coming to grips with our existence. The questions that constantly bounced back and forth among all thousands of us were – "Who were we? Where were we? What the hell were these colourful designs on our body? And were we supposed to spend all our life pressed uncomfortably close to each other?" Even though all of us were twins in appearance, there were many variations in our personalities. Some were vainly optimistic – “Look at us! We’re so perfect! Crisp and glossy!” while others remained morbid – “What’s the point of our life? I’m sure it’ll end any second now in horrible, harrowing death”. As for me, I just stayed quiet and tried to figure out what exactly I was.

One day, suddenly I felt myself being lifted and carried somewhere. And then, with no warning whatsoever, there was light! A giant effortlessly lifted my second cousins, then my first cousins, then my immediate brothers, and finally me, and handed us out to another giant. “Here’s your 2 Lakh Rupees Sir. Thanks for banking with us. Hope your daughter’s marriage is a wonderful success.” “Thanks for your wishes. And Remember Mishra ji, you have to be there personally to bless Shruti”, replied the recipient giant as he put me in his shirt’s pocket.

 

The next few days were among the happiest of my life. I came to really like the gentle giant, called ‘Manchanda ji’ by others, as he was continuously traveling to all sorts of fancy places with me peeping from his pocket. The place where he lived was decked up from top to bottom with all sorts of flowers, and fountains, and chandeliers, and giggling giantesses and laughing giants. The colours and noise reached their crescendo one night, as the whole place seemed to explode into a spectacle of lights. The sound of laughter intoxicated the ambiance to a dizzying high, when a dancing Manchanda ji pulled me out of his pocket, swirled me thrice over the best-dressed giant’s head and shoved me into his pocket. “You have my blessings and my happiness, son. I hope Shruti brings as much joy in your life as she brought in mine for all these years”.

Hmm.. So maybe I was Happiness.

What followed was an elaborate process involving fire, flowers and smiles with the giant and giantess going through uncountable rituals in the matter of a few hours. ‘Bride’ and ‘groom’ they were called, informed my cocky neighbour in the giant’s pocket.

In the wee hours of night, when all the noise had subsided and a warm silence had taken over, I witnessed something so beautiful and pure that it will remain with me over the next 120 years as well. Leaving the celebrations behind, the groom and the bride went in a large, dimly-lit room. At first, they were reluctant in each other’s presence, but gradually came close. With the lights turned down, the tenderness that followed makes me blush even to this day.

A few days after that, just as I was getting comfortable with my new life in the groom’s wallet, he went to a nearby market. Suddenly, an unfamiliar hand grasped the wallet, and in a flash the groom was left behind, clearly unaware of my absence. My temporary new residence was called a pick-pocket, as my new neighbours explained. But he didn’t keep me for long. Barely after a week, he took me out of his wallet and handed me to a sad looking woman.

Even though I was Happiness, she didn’t seem very happy to hold me. She clutched me tight in her hand, went to a small room, and applied red and yellow and all sorts of garish colours on her face. I don’t know if it was my imagination but she seemed as if she was deliberately trying to make herself look ugly. Finally, after she was done, she cast me a disgusting glance and muttered “It’s sick what I have to do for you...”. I had no idea what she was about to do for me.

In the next couple of hours, I witnessed a macabre unfolding of the same ritual that took place between the bride and the groom, with none of the tenderness, or warmth, or care that I had remembered earlier. Instead, there was an all-permeating, suffocating sadness in every particle, every object in the small, dingy room, but nowhere more so than in the eyes of the new bride.

And looking at her, I wondered if I was really Happiness… I couldn’t help but feel I was Sadness. Of the worst kind.

(To be continued...)

Preface

I'm a big fan of the whole Preface and Acknowledgments routine in books.

I know people usually skip these parts, and with good reason. Why would anyone want to read the list of people the author is thankful to, when one has never met or is likely to meet any of them in future? Also, why would one waste time on the author's personal beliefs, when the 'real deal', the facts, the theorems, the 'course' starts from Chapter 1?

 Acknowledgment and Preface?

For me the charm of Prefaces and Acknowledgments is that the 100 odd words at the beginning help me picture the person who has penned/typed the rest 100000 words as a distinct individual and not a droning voice in my head. Also, it defines the overall framework, and even the limitations of the book. Sample the Preface from H.C. Verma's Physics book in Class 12.

Imagine you're watching a game of Chess with your friends played by 2 expert players, but none of the spectators (including you) knows the rules. You can only watch the movement of the chess pieces on the board. Over some time, you observe that the pawns always move forward by 1 square. So, you frame a Law - 'A Pawn shall either remain stationary, or move forward by 1 square, given that the square is unoccupied.' The next 20 moves on the chessboard might validate your Law, but the 21st move suddenly sees the pawn moving forward diagonally and taking an opposition piece. Your Law stands violated even though it has held for 20 observations, so you form a new Law - 'The Pawn shall either remain stationary, or move forward by 1 square, given that the square is unoccupied, or move forward diagonally by a square, given that the square is occupied by an opposition piece.'

Physics, in H.C. Verma's definition, is similar to watching such a game of chess played out in the universe, where we observe what is going on and attempt to predict or control what will happen next, based on our observations and assumptions of how things work.

What fascinated me about this definition of Physics was the humility - 'There are no hard-and-fast, immutable Laws. If observations change, Laws change', and the acknowledgment of a divine entity - 'We can only guess the rules of the game, not the motivations of the Players'. Both the book and the subject of Physics, once seen in this light, appeared much more interesting from then on.

Another memorable Preface was the one in Linda Goodman’s book on Sun Signs. Before you judge my taste in books, let me tell you that I did not actually purchase it, but came across it at a friend’s house. You are free to judge my friend’s taste in books. Anyways, the Preface, which I expected to be mostly hocus-pocus (“Don’t ignore the ascent of Saturn over Crab Nebula at the time your mother popped you out.”), was refreshingly witty and candid. It did not make any claims at being able to predict a person’s exact nature based on their birth date. Instead, it said that the Sun Sign can be seen as one of many indicators of a person’s nature, not the only one.

I still don’t think that my birth date has anything to do with anything in my life, but the book is worth reading for its categorization of 12 kinds of people.

Well, I think I should get on with the Preface of this blog before I ramble any further. So, as the name on the top suggests, the blog will primarily be about Value Investing. My 2 decades of recently concluded formal education has included subjects as varied as Civics, French, Tae-kwon-do (Pink belt – Can mortally wound an ant with multiple stomps.. Hai Ya!), Biology, Economics, Data Structures, Geography, Engineering Drawing, Algorithms, Human Behaviour in Organizations, Statistics, and a lot of blah blah. Since my retention of this heady concoction of subjects is embarrassingly low, it was necessary to separate out the knowledge I intend to carry forward from the one which I’ll consign to trash.

So, as I bid Sayonara to hydrocarbons, gram panchayats, mica deposits, binary fission, Slave Dynasty, Fourier Transform, Verb conjugation, and tons of other similar mind-clogging ‘knowledge’, this blog is an attempt to assimilate and structure the knowledge worth continuing with. The umbrella under which I wish to assimilate this knowledge will be Value Investing, for 3 main reasons –

1)      Value Investing is a Practical thing – It’s not empty theory, or castles in the air. I hope to actually use Value Investing fundamentals in purchasing and selling stocks over time, and providing justifications of my purchases and sales on the blog, open for debate by visitors.

2)      Value Investing encourages multidisciplinary thinking – Value Investing is not conducive to tunnel vision. Instead, it actively encourages the use of mental models from different disciplines such as Economics, Game Theory, Psychology, etc. This means a lot for me ramble on about.

3)      Value Investing can be taken up as a Passive interest – Since my career lies in IT Consulting, I will obviously not be able to devote huge amounts of time to tracking stocks on a daily basis. Value Investing, with its typically long-term horizon, is hence ideal for someone like me who can only spend so much time going over the Financial News in a day.

Warren Buffett : The One Value Investor to rule them all

So, with the objective of the blog out of the way, it’s important to write about some of the limitations as well. The most important ones are Subjectivity and Stupidity. Subjectivity means that almost every sentence you read in the posts to follow, must be read after mentally appending ‘In my opinion’ at the beginning. For example, if I write that ‘Gold Prices are likely to fall by next year’, please read it as ‘In my opinion, Gold Prices are likely to fall by next year’. I’m not pretending to be a fortune-teller, and while I will try to give justification for any such statements, I can be horribly wrong. Which brings me to the second limitation – Stupidity.

Even though I’m a Finance specialization student, my understanding of Finance is only marginally better than my understanding of girls (To misquote Edison – “I haven’t failed in my attempts to impress girls a hundred times. I’ve successfully discovered a hundred things girls don’t care about”). What this means is that there are going to be a million mistakes, some silly, some laughable, and some unpardonable as I parade my limited knowledge of Finance on this blog. It is my sincere request to all Finance-literate people to tolerate such mistakes, and let me know through your comments where I have screwed up.

Finally, before I end this Preface, a little explanation on the ‘Random Stuff’ part of the heading. Those familiar with my earlier blog – Accidentally in MBA, know that I don’t exactly colour between the lines. Not all the posts will be related to Value Investing, and a lot of general stuff which I feel like sharing will be put up on the blog to desperately seek attention and admiration.

I guess that concludes the Preface. Hope to come up with Chapter-1 by next week.