A Small Diwali Gift: I’m offering a special discount on my books until 15th Nov. 2026. If you’ve been meaning to pick up a copy for yourself or gift one to someone you care about, this may be a good time. Explore the Diwali book offer.
One of my favourite snacks while growing up was a moong dal kachori. And I especially loved the ones made at Ram Bhandar.
It was a small shop in my hometown that, at least to my younger self, made the world’s best kachoris.
The shop had been around for years. Makhan Lal ji, who ran it, had spent much of his life making kachoris. And he probably did this without giving much thought to how much he knew about his craft.
He knew how to move his hands effortlessly around the dough and the moong dal filling. He knew exactly how hot the oil needed to be, how long to fry, and when to take the kachoris out.
And as he explained to us once while serving the hot kachoris, the real ‘magic’ came from years of doing the same work day after day, while making small adjustments, learning from mistakes, and gradually developing a feel for what made a good kachori.
A few years after leaving my hometown, I got to know that Makhan Lal ji had passed away. And, as happens in family businesses, the next generation took over.
I later heard from friends back home that they had introduced modern kitchen equipment to make production faster and more efficient. The shop continued to run, but somewhere in the transition, it lost something important.
The next generation had inherited the shop, its reputation, and its customers. What they had not inherited, at least not fully, was the knowledge that made those kachoris special.
They seemingly had become owners without first becoming apprentices. And perhaps that was where the real loss began.
Gradually, the kachoris stopped tasting the way they once did.
I’ve often thought about Makhan Lal ji and his kachoris. And I wonder how much knowledge disappears this way, when one generation fails to learn what the previous one knew.
I am reminded here of the ancient Indian tradition of the gurukul, where students would spend years living with their guru. They learned through instruction, observation, practice, and everyday life.
There was a reason learning took time.
I wonder whether we’re losing some of that patience today, especially as AI makes it easier to find answers without having to work through the questions ourselves.
In making knowledge so easily accessible, are we sometimes overlooking what it takes to understand something?
The philosopher Michael Polanyi once observed:
We can know more than we can tell.
What I understand from this is that much of what we know cannot be fully explained in words. Some understanding comes only through experience and practice, and we may struggle to describe it even when we become very good at what we do.
Think about learning to ride a bicycle. You can read books and watch videos to learn about balance, momentum, steering, and the physics of two wheels. But that won’t make you a cyclist.
For that, you must get on the bicycle, wobble, fall, correct yourself, and try again. Eventually, your body learns something that words alone could not teach.
Much of human knowledge works this way, whether you are a doctor, teacher, investor, or a halwai.
Here, I think about the time 20 years ago when I began studying investing through the ideas of Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and a few other great investors. Their writings changed how I thought about businesses, risk, money, and eventually life itself.
Their lessons took years to sink in, especially as I began applying them, making mistakes, and slowly understanding what they really meant.
Today, almost anyone interested in investing can quickly learn phrases like ‘margin of safety’, ‘circle of competence’, ‘economic moat’, and ‘intrinsic value’. These ideas are everywhere. And, yes, knowing these ideas is useful. But applying them is a different matter.
Take ‘margin of safety’, which is simple enough to explain in a few minutes. But applying it requires understanding a business, questioning assumptions, recognising uncertainty, and resisting the temptation to see what you want to see. None of these abilities comes automatically from just knowing the definition.
Or consider ‘circle of competence’. Almost every investor knows that Buffett and Munger emphasised that the size of your circle of competence matters less than knowing its boundaries.
But how do you discover the boundary of your competence? How do you recognise what you don’t know? How do you distinguish genuine understanding from familiarity?
These questions require years of reading, mistakes, and reflection.
We know that Buffett spent hours reading annual reports. But do we still read them?
We quote Munger on developing a latticework of mental models, though studying ideas outside our disciplines requires years of effort.
We repeat Graham’s lessons on investing and speculation, even as the patience to investigate a business before forming an opinion about its stock seems increasingly difficult to cultivate.
These ideas will probably survive for a long time. But I wonder how much of the understanding behind them will survive if fewer people practise the habits that produced it.
The new tools can help us learn more deeply, and I think the way we use them matters.
If you read a difficult book slowly, struggle with its arguments, and gradually make sense of it, you are doing more than collecting information. You are developing the ability to think.
On the other hand, an AI summary may give you the book’s conclusions accurately, but if you never engage with the arguments, you may never learn to think through them yourself.
In the same way, an investor who depends entirely on automated analysis may receive sophisticated and detailed answers without developing the ability to recognise when the answers are unreasonable.
I am worried about another possibility here. Sometimes knowledge disappears because we stop believing it is worth learning. And perhaps it is.
But unless we understand what that process was teaching us, we may discard something valuable without even realising it.
I often think about how much of what I know today came from people who took the trouble to teach me, directly or indirectly.
Books were part of it. So were teachers, colleagues, and years of working through problems that didn’t have obvious answers. Also, while some lessons were explained to me, I learned others simply by watching how experienced people approached their work. And many became clear only after I made mistakes of my own.
Maybe this is what makes knowledge such a fragile inheritance.
We can preserve books and instructions for generations. But understanding survives only in people who keep doing the work, and who still believe the slow way is worth the trouble.
I still visualise Makhan Lal ji lifting out his “world’s best kachoris” from hot oil at exactly the right moment.
I don’t know exactly what changed after he passed away. Perhaps the next generation tried their best to preserve what he had built. Perhaps they learned from him, but something was still lost along the way.
All I know is that years later, I still remember the taste of those kachoris. And I sometimes wish someone had been able to make them the way he once did.
A Small Diwali Gift: I’m offering a special discount on my books until 15 November 2026. If you’ve been meaning to pick up a copy for yourself or gift one to someone you care about, this may be a good time. Explore the Diwali book offer.
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