I think awareness on personal finance has gotten to an extreme now, to the point that anyone I meet is a stock trader and asks me to invest in ITC.
Anywhere I turn around people are looking at price fluctuations in their stock trading app. Lunch hall discussions are about latest IPOs. Tea time discussion about some company’s EBITDA.

Before 2017, it was rare to see people talking about mutual funds or stock trading. I remember first joining zoho at 2015, I got my salary account opened during the onboarding process. The bank guy made me open a recurring deposit for a good percentage of my salary.

The bank guy did it for commission or out of general good will, I don’t know. But thanks to him somehow that pattern of saving a percentage of income had stuck over the years.

Now if you ask someone to open an RD or even put the money in a bank. They are going to school you about inflation, the power of compounding and some quotes from Rich Dad Poor Dad.

When I started drawing my first salary. Pattabhi mama’s first advice was to apply for a home loan. His reasoning was that spending 75% of my salary on EMI for the house loan would bring financial discipline in my life. If not I would end up being a spendthrift, blowing money on bikes, cars, cigarettes and alcohol.

Thanks to the many posts of Sridhar and his prediction of the impending financial armageddon since the day I joined Zoho in 2015. I have stayed away from any sort of loans till now. Ending up with one house lesser, amounting to a net total of zero houses. But on the bright side a runway for a couple of years.

Coming back to the investment pattern, since 2017, there had been multiple factors that have influenced the investment pattern of the current lot. Aadhar based EKYC, Low Cost — High speed internet due to Jio, Low cost smartphones and the resulting boom in creation and consumption of Personal Finance videos on Youtube.

The EKYC has simply reduced the friction for registration. The first time I tried registering for Zerodha, I remember them sending me a bunch of files to be signed and returned back or something. There stopped my registration process. Compared to that, today’s registration is almost seamless. And even discovery is high due to these things being inbuilt in UPI apps like paytm.

Compared to the majority of the previous generation who would invest only in Real estate, Fixed Deposits and gold jewellery. The current generation has probably overcorrected a bit. Everyone now is an options trader, a swing trader or a momentum trader. Even Mutual funds are too basic an instrument to invest in.

The boom in the market has made everyone think that it is their very genius that has brought in the portfolio returns.

But I think this behaviour of stock trading is similar to that of driving. Almost everyone I know think of themselves as great drivers. You can find them driving right through a lamp post, then would lay the blame on lamp post. I haven’t come across a single person who met with an accident and told me that he was a shitty driver and hadn’t put the brakes at the right time.

They call it the Dunning-Kruger effect or something. The less you know about something, the more you think you know about it.

Things were great for a while, I could get the boring stuff done while entertaining myself. It seemed like the perfect solution. But as a few months progressed, I started noticing that I was more stressed out than usual, more irritable. And even the mundane things were taking more time than it should really take.

Since the corona days I have slowly been unwinding from this practice, now I think I am at a point where I prefer to not even listen to music or radio on the car, I rather sing out loud whatever I feel at the moment.

If I had to theorize on why I felt stressed out while listening to podcasts and why I am more relaxed now while not listening to it, I would say it was mere indigestion.

These low mental complexity tasks like driving, walking, running, working out, cleaning, vessel washing, folding clothes seem to provide us with idle time for our internal cpu. All the stimulus uptill that day is best processed in that idle time. When introducing another stimulus, we take up a good portion of that idle time.

A mind with no thoughts to process is the most relaxed mind.

And even in this digestion process I think there are two types, the active and the passive. I think 99.9% of our processing is passive, us being in the thoughts of our own, unaware of why we do what we do, why we feel what we feel but going about doing the things that any stimulus nudge us towards. Going from one stimulus to another. I see it as our zombie mode.

Then there is the active processing where we are aware of our thoughts, more actively involved in resolving them, sometimes the processing itself is initiated by us, like the act of problem solving or creation or while playing games like cricket or football, where there is a certain focus towards getting something done.

It is so easy to get into zombie mode, rare instances where we do come out of it, we are automatically pulled back if we aren’t alert. Does being alert simply involve practice, is it a question of just mental stamina. Or is there a way to override the zombie mode completely?

Set the premise, get the people involved into the premise, make them anticipate something to build the tension, release the tension with the punchline.

This concept of tension and release is pretty much the same for evoking any emotion from horror to action to comedy. There is this famous line by Hitchcock, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”

But when it comes to comedy the Bang or the punchline needs some level of surprise or shock value. It’s the surprise in a safe environment that makes people laugh.

Most comedians follow this approach of setup and punchline(tension and release).

Then there is another model where there in no release. Only the building up of the tension. The theory being, building up enough tension will eventually lead people to release it at different moments without understanding why they are laughing. I ll attach a link of an example of this.

Now going back to the first model of setup and punchline. Comedy is very subjective. What makes one person laugh, necessarily doesn’t have to make another person laugh. This is because a premise or setup need not be relatable for every person the same way. The response for the punchline is very much dependent on the context of the end user. The more involved or engrossed the person is into the context of the premise or setup, the punchline works proportionally to it.

This is where some geniuses figure the universal context. Direct examples are Charlie Chaplin and Rowan Atkinson(Mr. Bean). Comparatively less popular but highly acclaimed work of Rowan Atkinson is BlackAdder, but it didn’t enjoy the same universal appeal because the context was enclosed pretty much to the people who knew British history.

The search for universal context I feel is inward, a base realisation without attachments or associations. That is the art part in comedy. Everything else is craft.

All forms of work from coding to writing to designing, there is an art component and there is a craft component. What drives people to do any work is the art component. What makes the work better is the craft part of it. Maybe making great products also involves figuring the universal context.

And for every superstitious belief, my parents thought that they had a logical explanation. Almost all explanations felt logical except they weren’t. There was Anju Bobby George levels of jumping, when it came to conclusions.

Evenings were banned for a haircut because of the lack of visibility that the barber might suffer due to the lack of photon bombardment from the sun. The logic was bullet proof except I wasn’t planning to go for a haircut under a banyan tree during a new moon. And I wanted to tell them that recent developments in technology qualified for a revisit to the rule book like the invention of the light bulb. Financial dependence dictated otherwise. Data backed decision making is only for the employee, not the employer.

Banning evenings meant no haircut was possible during weekdays and I had school during saturdays as well. So sundays were designated for haircuts during my childhood.

I recently went for a haircut.

“ What would you like me to do”, asked the barber.

Unlike the olden days where my knowledge of hairstyles was limited to short and medium. I called in chatGPT for help.

“Hey GPT, answer me in the style of Jeeves here on and let me know the hairstyles that go with a beard.”, I prompted.

I was fixed on the idea of flaunting a beard since recently after marriage I discovered that I was suffering from a chronic deficiency of the jawline, and that my beard was the supplement for the deficiency.

“Very good, sir. I shall endeavor to assist you in your sartorial inquiry with the utmost decorum and finesse.

Regarding your question, sir, the interplay between beards and hairstyles can be quite delicate, as it is important to achieve a balanced and harmonious look. Allow me to offer a few suggestions: ..” said Jeeves and made a list of suggestions.

I googled the hair styles to get an idea of how it looked. I had landed on the hairstyle and I told him, “I would like you to do the messy quiff.”

“I don’t get what you mean, could you show me the picture?”, asked the barber.

If I were a barber and someone showed me a picture of Hrithik Roshan for reference, I would have passed two or three judgements and also would have warned him about the upcoming disillusionment. But my barber was like, “Pannidalam sir”.

“How long would you like the hair in the front to be?”, asked the barber.

“Light ah medium ah anna”, I said in the most non committal way. The word medium itself denoted non commitment to anything specific.

“How medium sir?, persisted the barber.

“Medium — Medium ah anna”, I persisted.

He trimmed, snipped and razored for about an hour and the final product was in the proximity of what I had asked of him which generally isn’t the case.

“You can’t expect the same look as in the photo sir, I have done what I could”, said the barber with a sense of defeat.

He had the look of a Taj chef who had been given spoilt milk to make pal payasam.

I consoled him. But there was nothing I could do for him.

“And your skin is too dry sir, too much dandruff, would you like to take our dandruff treatment?” asked the barber cross-selling his other offerings in the shop. After a lot of back and forth, and him pointing out many pain points in my constitution for which they had multiple solutions, we settled for a head massage with Navaratna oil.

Another guy came in to get this done. His biceps were the size of my thighs. His forearms looked like he didn’t open his entrance gate, rather bent the metal rods to enter them.

I went into instant brain freeze after the application of the menthol oil and my memory is a bit hazy after multiple concussions suffered at his hands. At one point I was wondering if he is the same guy who was the parotta master at the restaurant downstairs.

I told him that I suffered from a slight stiffness of the neck, he massaged it and transmuted it into the stiffness of the back.

I came back home, my wife had gone to the dentist to remove her retainers. She got everything done that the dental clinic had to offer from scaling, filling and appointment for a root canal, except remove her retainers. For that it seems only orthodontists were equipped.

I remember going to a dental clinic in Guduvanchery. If you want to feel like a car in a Ford assembly line, that is the place to go.

I went in with a tooth ache on the tooth where a root canal had already been done.

They first took me in for a 180 degree xray and told me that I had infection in the roots of the teeth where I had previously done a root canal.

I told them that this is exactly how I defined the problem before you put me on the full body x-ray.

Then they sent me to another room where a freshman dentist freshly minted out of the nearby SRM college came to check up on me.

I had friends who did their colleging in SRM. Most of them had 432 arrears before they passed out. Had this freshman paid attention to the root canal lectures in his college?, I wondered. More importantly I wanted to ask him, “did you join in management quota or merit?”. I didn’t want to sound like the hostel warden and kept these questions to myself.

Another freshwoman doctor came in to check up on me.

“Oh shit”, I thought to myself. The freshman was doing some intellectual flexing and occasional flirting with the freshwoman all the while when I was asked to keep my mouth in the “aaah” position. Without changing my “aaah” position, I prodded the freshman to give me some attention as well.

Then came in the senior doctor, looked at the xray and told me that I had an infection in the teeth where a root canal had already been done. I think all these doctors watch House MD which is their go to fantasy Television series and want to implement something similar in their real life.

Dentistry isn’t generally blessed with cases which requires Sherlock Holmes level of deduction abilities, in most cases the patient comes with the diagnosis, the root cause and the probable mode of remediation.

“I am having pain in my left teeth, there is a big cavity there, I eat a lot of chocolates and don’t brush my teeth at night, are you going to do a filling, a root canal or extract my teeth out?”

“So we ll be doing a re root canal to remove the infection and cap it afterwards” said the senior doctor. I couldn’t leave her just like that, I knew this before I came in. I wanted to know something more for the money I paid. So I asked her, “what is the root cause of this? How can we avoid it in the future? What is the control effectiveness of this solution? “.

“Lack of dental hygiene is the root cause.

Having a good dental hygiene is the solution.

Maintaining a good dental hygiene will effectively control the problem” said the senior doctor. No shit Byomkesh, I thought to myself.

The senior doctor then instructed her two juniors to remove the cap and do the prep work for root canal.

What is this internship going on with me as the test subject? Shouldn't they be technically paying me for their internships?

Both of them came towards me, the freshman checked my mouth again and asked the freshwoman, “You want to do it?”

“No, you do it” said the freshwoman giggling.

“No, you do it”, said the freshman with a grin.

“No, you do it”, said the freshwoman.

“Okay, I ll do it”, I said reaching out towards the drilling machine. Flirting and all is okay, but this is too much.

They finished the prep work, the senior doctor came in and did the root canal. Another super senior doctor came in and checked the x-ray after the procedure was done and he said that I suffered from an infection of the…

“Dei!”, By this point I had been drained of the infection and the energy to retort.

Then I was sent to another room where the freshwoman doctor came up to me with the multiple dental cap offerings.

She showed me two models and explained in detail about the both of them, but the insights I inferred from the conversation are as follows,

“ There are two models, the expensive one and the cheap one. Are you cheap mister? Are you going to buy the cheap one or the expensive one? “

I was like, “are there any cheaper offerings?”

From that room they sent me to the cash counter and looking at the bill I realized that in my pursuit of saving a tooth I had almost lost my kidney.

Pattabhi mama had insisted that I go to their place and get the family ration of foreign chocolates. Pattabhi mama’s house was in the adjacent street and it took me about 2 mins to reach his house from mine, strolling through the road that could fit in only one Maruti 800 at a time. On both sides there were open canals preempting 6 months of rain a year which was normal for Thrissur. The national highways connecting Thrissur was 2 Maruti 800’s wide to put things into perspective.

I had lost my sweet tooth since I was a kid and being the only non-senior citizen of the family I was forced by my parents to go to Pattabhi mama’s house and collect the memorabilia from the US of A.

I rang the door bell and I could hear Pattabhi mama giving instructions from his easy chair to Parvatha mami to open the door.

“Neeya?”, said Parvatha mami with a sense of disappointment. It looked as if she was expecting Clint Eastwood to pick her up for coffee and I showed up ruining the date.

“I was expecting the airtel technician to fix the internet, the issue has been going on for a week now. You are a software engineer only no? Can you look into the issue?, asked Parvatha mami.

“Did you try restarting the modem?”, I asked her confidently, I did have my doubts on whether she would know how to restart the modem or worse what a modem is. But I took care to not show the inherent prejudices on my face.

“Dei, when you said you were passionate about programming in 10th std I thought you were going to hack some Russian satellite. What is this? All you people working in IT can only think of restarting the modem? The bulb over internet is off, rest of them are working fine in the modem”, she said going towards the refrigerator.

I could again sense disappointment, but the texture of this disappointment was different from when she opened the door expecting the airtel technician. It had a sense of what one would say giving up on something, sprinkled with a curiosity about what will happen to a certain something if the state of the something doesn’t change in the near future.

From the freezer she removed a zip lock full of assorted chocolates and transferred it to another smaller zip lock that used to be the host of severely old pudinas. The assortment contained a few Hershey’s dark chocolates, kisses, Toblerone and Snickers.

This was all fine during the license raj before 1990, not that I was expecting Pattabhi mama to bring medicated gummy bears, but to bring the same chocolates that you could get from Varkeys supermarket was in my opinion a frivolous exercise. The modern gentleman perceives all tasks as a function of time and effort. And by my calculations ordering Toblerone on instamart while watching Onepunch man had the shortest displacement of time and effort.

Shelley and the other romanticists might tell me to factor in the unquantifiable quality time spent with the elders in the family. Let me tell you Shelley, I prefer to regret the time not spent with these elders after their passing than regret spending time with them all the way till their passing. And with improvements in medical science, it will be at least 30 years till I come to the point of regretting my actions.

“Why carry all this luggage from the US of A. You could have gotten them from Varkeys supermarket itself no mami?”, I said. I was proud of how I had managed to bring in sarcasm, concern for the elderly and the venting of my frustration all in a single line. What a layered writer I am, I thought to myself.

“It is from Varkeys only da Easwar.” she said.

“huh?”

“Who would carry all this luggage all the way from there. Pattabhi mama had only got it from Varkeys after our return. I had distributed all the chocolates, now the remaining chocolates in the freezer Pattabhi mama is not leaving alone. So I thought I ll dispose them off as soon as possible.” she said.

Why stop at chocolates, dig a bit deeper into the fridge and you can find day before yesterday’s sambhar. Pour that over my head as well, I thought to myself, but I refrained from showing that in my face. The gentleman’s code is to entertain the elderly even at ones expense.

Pattabhi mama raised his left buttocks while sitting on the easy chair and a stream of intestinal gas was guided with care into the hall. I have seen old people farting with aplomb, but to take efforts to nudge and guide them I feel is a bit over indulgent. The law of diffusion would take care of itself, I wanted to tell Pattabhi mama. After a few seconds my olfactory receptors could sense that Pattabhi mama has had his fair share of Hershey’s dark chocolates, Kisses, Toblerone and Snickers. I couldn’t blame Parvatha mami on her thought of disposing the chocolates, I thanked them both, bade them goodbye and jumped out of the house for a breath of fresh air.

Fear about nothing specific, but as vague as it can be

Let me know the source of my fear

I am ready to resolve it

Let me know why I fear

I am ready to accept it

The mystics tell me my fear stems from my instinctual fear of death.

I look into me and I am happy as one can be

Life has gifted me with abundance and I am too young to worry about death.

I leave the mystics alone and ask myself why I fear

It is uncertainty that you fear, says my self

There comes a moment when there is no fear, for uncertainty is what makes my life worth living.

If life were certain, I would be bored to death and called him to pick me up sooner.

Why do I still fear after accepting the uncertainty, I ask myself.

So long as you ask me for answers, you exist

So long as you exist fear will also exist, says my self.

Not knowing what to do, I shout and cry into the unknown:

Give me the heart of a gladiator, to have the courage to take on anything that comes towards me.

Give me the heart of a child, to look at everything with awe and wonder

Give me the heart of a mother, to love everyone unconditionally.

Give me the heart of a gambler, where uncertainty is what excites me the most.

There was a complete change in lifestyle since I started working, I still clearly remember the second day of office, where my whole body was aching. I was never used to sitting in front of the computer for so long. And my body wasn’t ready for it. Within a week I was accustomed to the new normal of an office goer.

3 regular meals, infinite visits to the pantry to gulp down on coffee(made of gradually condensing milk through the day) and cash on hand to order from any restaurant took me to about 80 Kgs within the first year. Some kind of an internal alarm goes off in my body when I reach the above mentioned critical mass and that usually makes me check my weight. Hitting the gym, yoga, football and jogging are some of the irregular activities that I ended up doing bringing my weight back to 70 odd kilos. Once I feel good internally, automatically the physical activities that I do reduces over time and this sinusoidal pattern of hitting 80 and coming back to 70 continues till date.

Except for playing football I never liked any other activity and it just felt forced. During the second lockdown I had hit the critical mass and didn’t feel good internally. Football was ruled out and now I had to figure to do something on my own. I was doing yoga and body weight exercises inside my house but it just wasn’t working. I realized that either my workout wasn’t intense enough or I needed some cardio. I decided on the latter. And by cardio how would I choose something like walking that is meant for old people with arthritis and slip disc. I am a 28 year old with affinity to football, so I decided to start off with a 2 Km run every day in the mornings.

With Fitbit in my arms and Kipchoge in my heart, I completed the 2 KM in some 12 or 13 odd minutes. The next two days I was down with fever, probably from the pure shock that my body went through after 1 year of lockdown. I would do this for about a week trying to beat my own time every other day. The fever should have given me a hint that this was not for me. But what made me stop doing it was the sleep inducing effects of running by 11:30 in the morning.

Walking and Ramana ashram

I was never really a fan of walking but I did visit Ramana ashram from time to time and doing the Girivalam(walking around the mountain) was my alone time to think. It was never really about walking, but more of a private space in the open. With the lockdown restrictions and about 2 years of not visiting Tiruvannamalai, I thought why not circle around the hills of Nellikuppam road. One weekend with no specific agenda I thought I will walk till I get tired and then maybe book an ola to come back home. The experience was no different to that which I did in Tiruvannamalai. I felt a lot relaxed and calmer than before. More importantly I never felt tired physically.

I started walking every day then on and the agenda was to purely wander, play with the plants and the like. No phones, songs or Fitbit. I would look forward to walk in the open space whenever I had time, but with any other physical activity I had to force myself to wake up in the mornings. The usual route took me around an hour and later when I measured it, it was about 4/5 odd kms.

The unintended side effect was that I am around 68 Kgs now, because it was never planned as an exercise to reduce weight, but something I took up for my mental well being.

I have been practicing meditation on and off sitting inside my house. But there is a certain effort-fullness to meditate while sitting, whilst there is an effortlessness to meditate while walking.

The news about Bitcoin then(2013) to me was what it was in 2017, just news.

Around 2017 is the time I started hearing about the keywords blockchain, shared ledger and even the existence of other crypto currencies. Friends, Romans and all other gentlemen I knew had already invested in 5 different coins, some boasting 4X and 5X returns and plans to purchase Harley-Davidsons or holding it till it converts into a Mercedes Benz.

Me in 2017 had some cash on him. I had been working for 2 years then. I did some reading, I thought I got what a blockchain is then, I don’t think I still get it now.

After the expertise that I gained after reading two blogs on Bitcoin, I had the same thing that SJ Surya had to say to #Atman Silambarasan TR in Manaadu. “I am convinced, but I don’t want to take a chance”. Convinced about bitcoin and it’s potential, but not enough to invest any money into it and expect a return. I felt like I was 10 years too late to join the party even though the whitepaper was published in 2008. Since then I had made my peace with Bitcoin and never looked back at it.

Back then I did hear about Ethereum, Ripple and the like but was never really intrigued to look into it.

Cut to 2020, I randomly stumble upon a tweet thread describing the pain points that ENS solves.(Think of it like DNS, but maps your public key to your user name in a shared memory). This was pretty much the “sillaraya sethara vitta” moment for me personally. Though the concept had existed long before with the likes of namecoin, I came to know of them only in 2020.

What followed was a personal ens name, easwar.eth

Pinning a static html in IPFS to redirect to my personal blog. https://easwar.eth.limo

I am writing this post because of a profound question raised by my friend, “Idhunala(easwar.eth) yaarukku enna prayojanam bro?”

Nalla kelvi… Adutha Kelvi…

Currently there is none and whatever use case is achieved is pretty much superficial.

To be honest what drew me to it was, it took me back to the days when I created my first email id in order be on Orkut. I now have unified my payments and web portal, what I would like in the future as a consumer is,

The ability to send and receive email/text as easwar.eth

Get it linked with my Aadhar.

Hopefully rest of the use cases will follow to make my life easier. I don’t want to remember my pan, uan(epfo) or my aadhar ID. And I want to use it across services, both local and global.

Currently as a consumer the hurdles I faced during the process are as follows

Gas Cost

I have heard about intestinal gas causing heart attack like symptoms to old people. But the Ethereum gas gives assured heart attack to the young and old alike. It cost around 20K in total with about 90% costs being the gas charges. I did think of waiting till proof of stake released hoping for drastic reduction in gas charges, but I don’t think easwar.eth would be available then.

Wallets

It’s kind of scary to not be able to recover forgotten passwords and the backup code(seed phrase) is stored in some other ecosystem.

Crypto Exchanges and Regulations

The whole onboarding experience is brutal, I had to try out three crypto exchange apps before I got my kyc approved by WazirX. The only document they didn’t ask me was my horoscope. Add to it, I couldn’t pay using UPI. Had to configure a mobikwick wallet, load money into it and then purchase eth from there.

And an additional gas cost to transfer eth from WazirX’s wallet to my private wallet.

Atleast for the time being I don’t see any reason for mass adoption.

But what I wonder is will ENS ( or similar services) get mass adoption without the push of Big Tech?

Will Big Tech adopt the concept of a portable identity still retaining the essential ingredients to trap people into ecosystems?

Does public goods like these need a push from an external agency(Big Brother). Like how TRAI came up with the mobile number portability rules and enforced it upon the operators to create a level playing field.

“No mama, I am not in for any speculation. And I think I have also inherited the family trait of taking no risk and remaining poor. Hence I have remained aloof from it. But the crypto technology looks promising, I’ll adopt it whenever it becomes mainstream.”, I said.

“What promising technology?”, asked Pattabhi mama.

“One use case is smart contracts mama. You bought that land alongside that highway project 10 years ago saying that the value will double in 2 years right?”

“Yes da, Highway also didn’t come, Buyer also didn’t come.”

“Yes mama, even back then I did admire your confidence on an investment based on a highway project in Kerala. Recently only one highway project was completed with much fanfare, the foundation stone for the project was laid during the Chera dynasty.

Okay, coming back to smart contracts, say you do have a buyer and he says he’ll come up with the money in 3 months time and wants you to hold the sale. You ask him to pay some deposit. If he doesn’t come up with the money in 3 months you don’t have to return the deposit.

Say you also have an agreement that if he returns to you with a “no” in 7 days, you pay back the deposit. You can make a smart contract for that, it automatically takes care if the conditions are met and does the money transfer.”

“Oho!” exclaimed Pattabhi mama.

“You can do that using the Ethereum network, they are based on the principle that ‘Code is law’.”, I said.

“Ayyayyo”

What “Ayyayyo” mama?

“Dei Easwara, Indian government passes law through Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha and the President. Even then our laws are apdi ipdi only. If fellows like you write code and say code is law na, damal dumeel only. The whole world will descend into chaos.”

I don’t know what made him gain that impression of me, probably the time I said I ll make his smart phone faster and ended up erasing all his contacts. Since then Pattabhi mama keeps only theoretical discussions on technology with me. When it comes to execution he goes to Kamala Mobiles near Shakthan Stand.

“Valid point mama, probably technology will develop to a point that even coding becomes idiot proof.”, I said.

“Yes yes, very very necessary.”, said Pattabhi mama rubbing Dettol in the already inflicted wound.

“Why this sudden interest in bitcoin?” I asked.

“All this pandemic situation looks very gloomy, so I thought I should diversify my portfolio.”, said Pattabhi Mama.

“Oho. How much pension are you receiving?”, I asked. Pattabhi mama is quite free in discussing financial matters since he is confident that I wouldn’t be asking him for a loan. He showed me his passbook. I understood why the Kerala government was in financial distress. Pattabhi mama was in his late 60’s and I could see another solid 40 years on him with improvements in technology and medicine. The Kerala government was bound to get bankrupt in the next 10 years only by paying Pattabhi Mama’s pension, not to mention the members of Pattabhi mama’s “Retried government employees who watch county cricket to pass time” club at Parmekkavu temple.

I was planning to suggest a portfolio of nifty index funds, gold and fixed deposits. But with his constant money supply outperforming benchmark indices, I fell on his feet doing a Shastanga Namaskaram.

Note: There are three other stories in the Pattabhi Mama series.

https://www.instagram.com/easwar_aiyer/

You can check the highlights to track them if you are interested.

Tao Te Ching — Lao Tzu

One hundred years of solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Much Obliged Jeeves — P G Wodehouse

Weekend Wodehouse — P G Wodehouse

Creativity — Osho

Six Easy Pieces — Richard Feynman

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves — P G Wodehouse

Uncle Fred in the Springtime — P G Wodehouse

Fear — Osho

Meetings with remarkable men — G I Gurdjieff

Gitanjali — Rabindranath Tagore

Who Am I? — Ramana Maharshi

Love, Freedom and Aloneness — Osho

Intuition — Osho

The Gospel of Ramakrishna