Gifts of Wisdom: Save on My Books + Mastermind (Until 31st October 2025)
Every Diwali, we clean corners we don’t usually look at. It’s a nice metaphor for our inner world too — for our habits and biases that need some fresh air. So this year, I’m sharing limited-time offers on the few things I created to help us see more clearly: my books and the Mastermind Membership.
🎁 The Sketchbook of Wisdom & Boundless (both hardcover): Read my reflections on self-discovery, growth, and living a life that’s yours.
- Click here to buy Boundless
₹1799₹1299 - Click here to buy Sketchbook
₹1799₹1499 - Click here to buy the combo (Boundless + Sketchbook)
₹3598₹2599 - Even bigger discounts are available on bulk orders — you’ll find details on the respective order pages.
🎁 Mastermind Value Investing Membership: My most comprehensive learning program, which now also includes Value Investing Almanack and weekly/biweekly live Q&A sessions, is open with ₹3,000 off for new members. Click here to join now.
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari tells the story of the French carmaker Peugeot to explain something interesting about the human mind—our ability to believe in what does not physically exist.
Peugeot, he writes, is not the factory, the cars, or even the employees. All of these can disappear, yet Peugeot would continue to exist. It was born from a few sheets of paper signed by a group of lawyers in 1896. From that moment onward, it lived as an idea, a legal fiction, and a shared belief that united thousands of people under one name.
Harari uses Peugeot to symbolise what he calls an imagined order, which is the uniquely human capacity to create and believe in things that are not tangible, yet shape our lives completely. Money, nations, religions, and companies are all imagined orders. They exist because enough people agree they do. These beliefs allow humans to cooperate in vast numbers, far beyond the limits of personal trust.
An investor in India can invest in a French carmaker, a Japanese electronics firm, or an American technology company because all participants believe in the same imagined rules of ownership, contracts, and corporations. This shared trust in invisible ideas is what has made human progress possible.
Yet, the same imagination that builds civilisations can also cloud judgment. The stock markets thrive on these imagined orders.
When a new company goes public, what investors buy is not just equity but a belief. They invest in a ‘story’ about the future. And a belief or a story, once amplified through media and marketing, becomes a force of its own.
In recent years, India has witnessed a surge of IPOs (initial public offerings) where the story has run far ahead of substance. Many of these companies are still loss-making, yet they have been valued as if the future were already guaranteed. Promoters and early investors, riding on waves of optimism, have used these moments to sell their stakes at prices inflated by hope.
There is nothing unlawful about this. It’s how markets work. But it is also a reminder of how fragile belief can be when detached from reality.
The concept of the limited liability company (simply, a “corporation” or a “company”) that Harari writes about is another of humanity’s remarkable inventions that was meant to encourage risk-taking by capping personal loss. It helped ordinary people become entrepreneurs without the fear of ruin. But it also introduced a subtle moral gap. When companies act irresponsibly, their founders can hide behind the corporate veil and say, “It wasn’t me; it was the company.”
Coming from a small Marwari business family, where there was no concept of limited liability, I have seen a few relatives’ businesses and, along with them, family wealth go down completely because they took chances that backfired. Back then, a business failure meant personal financial ruin. You could lose not just the factory, but also the family home, gold, and silver, not to forget the reputation. That is no longer the case in the modern world of corporations, even though many of them in India are still run by Marwaris. The company structure has given today’s entrepreneurs the courage to take risks that earlier generations could not afford.
This detachment often takes the form of selling an inflated dream. When promoters cash out at peak valuations while calling it “value unlocking,” they are operating within the rules, but not necessarily within the spirit of fairness.
This moral gap becomes most visible when narratives replace numbers. Many modern founders, especially in the startup world, speak the language of “purpose” and “disruption” while quietly benefiting from market exuberance. They aren’t necessarily dishonest but just operating in a system that rewards belief more than prudence.
Take, for instance, the founder of an eyewear company (whose colleague called them a “tech company”) that’s preparing for a (much overpriced) public issue, who has publicly said, “I don’t have to justify valuations. My job is to only justify value for the customer and how to make the best quality products at the lowest price possible. I don’t understand valuations, but it is largely done by ‘strong advisors’.”
And when asked by a television anchor how much value he had left on the table for shareholders, he said, “As a company, our job is to create value for the customers, and as far as the valuation is concerned, it is what the market decides. There are investors who are selling shares, and there are investors who are coming in, and they have done a lot of working to arrive at these numbers.”
Do you see any sense in these statements (except the ‘customer’ part)? I don’t. These are garbled and mugged-up messages, but also telling ones. The modern entrepreneur can disown responsibility for how their company is valued, something that would have been unthinkable in the old world of family-run businesses, where every rupee was personal skin in the game. Limited liability made risk-taking safer, but it also made accountability thinner.
For us as investors, the danger lies in the seductive psychology that accompanies new businesses going public. The narrative is always persuasive: India’s growth story, technology disruption, demographic tailwinds, digital revolution, etc. etc.
The pitch is compelling because it offers the chance to participate in something bigger than oneself. But investing, in its purest form, is about buying earnings and not joining any movements. The finest businesses in India (also part of Harari’s “imagined order”), ones that have truly built wealth over decades, never needed marketing campaigns or endorsements. They let their results do the talking.
Now, I am not being cynical here but trying to nudge you towards discernment. Harari reminds us that while imagined orders are powerful because we believe in them, they are also malleable. They can change, and sometimes, they collapse. A company that exists purely in imagination can disappear just as easily as it appeared. We as investors must therefore learn to see through the story and into the substance.
Every time we invest, we participate in a fiction, but we must ensure it is a well-grounded one. Our job as investors is to distinguish between imagination that creates value and imagination that merely sells it.
What I see in the IPO market is a kind of heist, though a legal one. It’s about the slow erosion of scepticism in the face of beautiful storytelling, about how belief, when left unchecked, can so easily turn into self-deception.
Markets will always be full of new stories, but our task is to decide which ones deserve our faith. The idea is to not stop believing but believing—and ‘seeing’—wisely.
Gifts of Wisdom: Save on My Books + Mastermind (Until 31st October 2025)
Every Diwali, we clean corners we don’t usually look at. It’s a nice metaphor for our inner world too — for our habits and biases that need some fresh air. So this year, I’m sharing limited-time offers on the few things I created to help us see more clearly: my books and the Mastermind Membership.
🎁 The Sketchbook of Wisdom & Boundless (both hardcover): Read my reflections on self-discovery, growth, and living a life that’s yours.
- Click here to buy Boundless
₹1799₹1299 - Click here to buy Sketchbook
₹1799₹1499 - Click here to buy the combo (Boundless + Sketchbook)
₹3598₹2599 - Even bigger discounts are available on bulk orders — you’ll find details on the respective order pages.
🎁 Mastermind Value Investing Membership: My most comprehensive learning program, which now also includes Value Investing Almanack and weekly/biweekly live Q&A sessions, is open with ₹3,000 off for new members. Click here to join now.
Nice, unambiguous blogpost on IPO heist happening in the country.