Life

One of the most profound thoughts I’ve ever read on the child-parent relationship comes from the noted Lebanese-American artist and poet Kahlil Gibran, who wrote the following under the title “On Children” –

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The first time I read these thoughts, my first reaction was – “If my children are not my children, then whose are they? And what do you mean they are not mine?”

[Read more…] about One Big Investing Lesson I Learned Late in My Life

You seem to be stressed out today?” asked my Yoga teacher, a gentleman in his late fifties.

“Oh, not really!” I said.

“No, you look a bit stressed. Are you unwell?”

“Not at all. Just feeling a bit confused.”

“May I help?”

“Knowing you, I think you can.”

“Shoot!”

“You see, I have been a stock market investor for many years now, and now also don the role of a teacher trying to help people make saner and better investment decisions. But I am often faced with a dissonance.”

“And what’s that?”

[Read more…] about 3 Iron Rules of Life and Investing

There is a story, not often told, in Mahabharata where the eldest of the Pandavas, Yudhishthira, comes upon a lake and finds that his brothers lay dead on its banks.

Before beginning the search into his brothers’ murder, the prince in exile finds himself burning with thirst and reaches into the lake to drink, not knowing that it was drinking from the lake that brought his brothers’ end.

At that moment a celestial appears, a Yaksha, no god or angel but instead a presence of power presiding over the lake. The Yaksha warns Yudhisthira not to drink lest he suffers the fate of his brothers.

He has an alternative: Yudhisthira can instead answer Yaksha’s questions. There are said to be eighteen questions that Yaksha asked Yudhisthira, but here is the one that concerns what I am writing today.

[Read more…] about Meditations on Mortality in Life and Investing

Value Investing Workshop in Bangalore (9th Sept – Sold Out), Chennai (23rd Sept), Mumbai (30th Sept), Hyderabad (7th Oct). Click here to register now. Few seats remain!

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I was 23, straight out of college, when I came to Mumbai in 2001. I had come from a small town in Rajasthan with a population of under 2 lac, or 0.02 crore. Mumbai was 80 times more crowded, and I was scared.

I had just accepted a seat at an MBA college in this city, and my father had paid the fee. So, there was no looking back. Now when I think back about those times, it was quite possibly the most intimidating situation I had ever gotten myself into thus far.

But I did not want to be a quitter, so I stayed, struggled to get along with the city and its people, and still stayed.

In the first few weeks at college, I flunked more than half of my classes as I was too shy and scared to be out of my accommodation and onto the crowded roads and public transport and then into my class of ‘city’ students.

I never felt as vulnerable in my life as then.

[Read more…] about Being Vulnerable