While Groucho’s observation wasn’t quite accurate—many of us do make money by doing some things we dislike because there are EMIs to pay, bad lifestyle habits to sustain, pointless things to acquire —he had hit upon a kind of money-making that middle-class boomers like me had ignored, even resisted, for a considerable part of our adult, earning lives: investing in the stock market and watch this potted money sprout more money. Theoretically, it allows me to step out of the usual pattern of earning money—in exchange for work, some of it undesirable—and watch it literally grow, thanks to some magic that I’m too much of a Muggle to understand (or want to understand).
“The Indian middle class has fallen in love with systematic investment plans (SIPs),” wrote Swami, “in which they have a certain fixed sum deducted from their salary every month and invested in a mutual fund. Amateurs generally perform badly in stock markets…. The best way is to systematically invest a fixed sum or proportion of salary every month… into a mutual fund and leave the choice of the portfolio to a professional fund manager. This strategy has proved very successful in the last decade, and so has become increasingly popular.” He was talking about me!
Coming from the boondocks of 1980s middle-class India, stocks and shares had the ring of “charas and ganja” in our household—dangerously giddy-making things that “decent people” of the professional classes didn’t indulge in.
Dabbling in stocks—the word “dabble” itself giving off fumes of the dark arts—was the domain of Pan Parag-chewing men in safari suits and high swivel chairs. It was two Ludo squares away from Dawood Ibrahim country.But at the same time, images of the Bombay Stock Exchange threw up a compelling vision of a different India, so very distant from lines in banks, electricity bill queues, monthly salary cheques in envelopes—the “safer” but oh-so-anodyne and banal interactions with money. The BSE building’s Tower of Babel architecture in Bombay, resembling a giant luxury cruiser, was the symbol of another country within our country, measuring the momentum of a nation that the rest of us didn’t seem to be a part of, even though we secretly hoped to hitch a ride on.The liberalised ’90s made this allure even more alluring. Economic liberalisation coincided with my entry into the job market. I was at last plugged into the Indian economy, if not quite to the wheels of the Indian industry that were picking up dieselish pace. This was also when I started reading business magazines, almost in a clandestine manner as if I was turning through the latest issue of Debonair (note to millennials: look it up on the internet).
But just before I became a tax-paying citizen of India, Harshad Mehta happened. The “We told you so!” from middle-class Middle India was resounding, booming and stentorian. If there was any plan whatsoever of putting a smidgen of my monthly savings in anything remotely “stock-y”, the “safe-sounding” mutual funds included, that got shafted by one iconic suitcase that we were told had contained ₹1 crore—₹67 lakh, to be precise.
But the fruits of liberalisation eclipsed both the humdrum hum of a world that contained shortsighted Doordarshan as well as the amoral world of corporate safari suits ’n’ suitcases. By the late ’90s, I made the first forays into Ever-Ever Land by opening an account in a—wait for it—private bank. For a full year and more at the turn of the last century, I hoped against hope that HDFC Bank wouldn’t one fine day just shut shop and decamp with my moderately hard-earned money.
By another decade, other Lakshman rekhas were stepped over one by one—the most thrilling one being “hiring” a professional fund manager. Quickly, I “entered” the market—with the Dutch courage of me not having to directly deal with the Beast of the Bourse. Perhaps, this was what giving a supari felt like—you didn’t do the job yourself, but hired someone to do the hit job. And for me, Tarandeep Singh remains the man. Soon, out of the same sense of a mix of peer pressure and FOMO, I was applying for a home loan, and feeling like a mix of Haji Mastan and Warren Buffet.
As I read the news of the wonderful abstraction of $5 trillion market capitalisation, I finally had the courage to ask my friend, assets philosopher and guide Tarandeep to share the link that would provide me online access to my investment portfolio. After waiting a few days, I finally opened my current holdings. The Allahabad Bank account-holding man-child finally felt plugged into that building—Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers on Dalal Street, Kala Ghoda, Fort, Mumbai, an Enfield Bullet ride away from Muqaddar Ka Sikandar’s opening sequence on Marine Drive. Oh, and into 2024 “Shake Your Moneymaker” India.
