Although Groucho’s observation was not entirely right – many of us actually make money by doing things we don’t like because we have to pay EMIs, maintain bad lifestyle habits and buy pointless things – he came up with a type of money-making that the Boomers demographics like me have ignored and even resisted much of our adult lives by investing in the stock market for a living and watching that money grow into more money. Theoretically, it allows me to break out of the usual pattern of making money – in exchange for work, sometimes undesirable ones – and watch it literally grow, thanks to some magic I’m too muggle to understand (or want to understand).
“The Indian middle class has fallen in love with systematic investment plans (SIPs),” Swami wrote, “where a fixed sum is taken from their salary every month and invested in a mutual fund. Amateurs generally do poorly on stock markets…. The best way is to systematically invest a fixed amount or part of your salary each month… in an investment fund and leave the choice of portfolio to a professional fund manager. This strategy has proven to be very effective over the last decade and is therefore becoming more and more popular. He was talking about me!
Coming from the backwoods of the Indian middle class in the 1980s, stocks and shares had a “charas and ganja” feel in our house – dangerously dizzying things that “respectable people” of the professional classes did not allow themselves.
Playing stocks – the very word ‘messing’ gave off fumes of black magic – was the domain of Pan Paraga – chewing men in safari suits and high swivel chairs. It was two Ludo squares from the land of Dawood Ibrahim. But at the same time, the images of the Bombay Stock Exchange brought to featherlight a fascinating vision of another India, so far removed from queues in banks, queues for electricity bills, monthly checks with salaries in envelopes – “safer”, but so anodyne and banal interactions with money. The architecture of the Tower of Babel at the BSE building in Mumbai, resembling a gigantic luxury cruiser, was a symbol of another country within our country, measuring the dynamics of a nation that the rest of us didn’t feel a part of, even though I secretly hoped to hitchhike. The liberalized 1990s made this allure even more appealing. Economic liberalization coincided with my entry into the labor market. I was finally connected to the Indian economy, though not to the wheel of the Indian industry that was gaining diesel momentum. That’s when I started reading business magazines, almost secretly, as if I was flipping through the latest issue of Debonair (note to millennials: look it up online).
But just before I became a tax-paying citizen of India, Harshad Mehta happened. The program “We told you so!” middle class in central India sounded, thunderous and stentorian. If there was ever a plan to put a bit of my monthly savings into something even remotely ‘spare’, including ‘safe-sounding’ mutual funds that had been defrauded by one iconic suitcase that we were told contained £1 crore… More specifically, 67 lakhs.
But the fruits of liberalization have overshadowed both the monotonous bustle of the myopic Doordarshan world and the amoral world of corporate suits and safari suitcases. In the delayed 1990s, I first visited Ever-Ever Land, opening an account at – wait for it – a private bank. Throughout the year and even more at the turn of the 20th century, I hoped against hope that one fine day HDFC Bank would not simply close down its operations and move to another country with my moderately hard-earned money.
Over the next decade, Lakshman’s rekhas were missed one after another – the most invigorating one being the “hiring” of a professional fund manager. I quickly “entered” the market – with Dutch courage in that I did not have to deal directly with the Beast of the Stock Exchange. Maybe that’s what giving supari was like – you didn’t do it yourself, but you hired someone to do a hit job. And for me, Tarandeep Singh remains a man. Soon, out of that same sense of peer pressure and FOMO, I was applying for a home loan and feeling like a mix of Haji Mastan and Warren Buffet.
When I read the news about the wonderful abstraction of a $5 trillion market cap, I finally had the courage to ask my friend, asset philosopher and guide Tarandeep, to share a link that would give me online access to my investment portfolio. After a few days of waiting, I finally opened up my current stock. The man-child running the Allahabad bank account finally felt connected to this building – Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers on Dalal Street, Kala Ghoda, Fort, Mumbai, not far from Enfield Bullet from the opening sequence of Muqaddar Ka Sikandar on Marine Drive. Oh, and in India in 2024 “Shake Your Moneymaker”.
