The Eternal Pilgrim

The Eternal Pilgrim
(This tribute to a departed friend was originally written for the magazine Life Positive in 1996.
It was expanded and adapted for a 'story-telling session' to a convention of travel agents, SITE, in 2015)

If you want a glimpse into the soul of India, set out on a pilgrimage.

Join the 500,000 pilgrims who labour each year up steep paths, along dizzying gorges, to Kedarnath. Here, 12,000 feet above the sea, a medieval stone temple nestles in a remote valley. Winter recedes late, and the meadows see the briefest of summers, before the monsoons lash the paths with hail and rain. Two years ago, a cloud burst caused a flash flood that took the lives of 6000 pilgrims, and destroyed the entire township. Only the temple survived. To the devout, this is testimony to the power of the Lord Shiva. To the scientific, it points to intelligent medieval architects, who erected the edifice on a large stone platform.

Modern Indians find a comfortable balance between rationality and faith; between scientific temper and unquestioned ritual. But on my first visit to Kedarnath, all of 12 years old, I lost this balance - and questioned my parents’ faith in the priesthood, and in the value of ritualised prayer. On the one hand was the devotion of thousands - like my mother - who had braved the long drive, the rocky climb, woken in the dark and bathed in the icy cold to worship at the shrine; on the other, the ugly face of the temple clergy’s transparent greed; the complete absence of aesthetic in their worship. I was pushed from one priest to another, told where to kneel, and where to join my hands. I was nauseated by the smell of rancid ghee (clarified butter). Barefoot, I squirmed at the untold horrors of grime underfoot, and was maddened by the unceasing clangor of tuneless bells, I had no choice but to conclude that The Sacred - whatever it is - dwelt outside of this ugly hole.

“Cherish the journey”, I pleaded with an aged pilgrim decades later, as he struggled up the slope in his tattered clothes. “Will I make it to the temple in time for the evening prayer?” he pleaded.

“This river is a prayer, these towering forests an entire rosary”. But his tired eyes had no time for them - his quest was joined to the temple, to the idol, to those clanging bells. “Drink some water, old man, and may the temple bring you peace.”

In my thirties at the time, I had turned to the science of yoga, and I talked to my spiritual teacher about this old man’s attachment to the temple. “The abstract is too difficult for most. The temple is just another path, like yours.” He asked me to be gentle with those who needed symbols.

Again and again, I returned to Kedarnath. Was the path my symbol? Did I seek to draw energy from the heavens, that here seemed both closer and deeper; to be inspired by the glistening snows; to draw comfort from the dark unpolished stone of the Kedar shrine?.

On my second trip, now a young adult, I had stood alone above the stream, in the early velvet of an autumn night. The first stars had pierced the skies, and the river Mandakini danced in phosphorescent delight. Sheltered by the black warmth of a craggy rock, I was blessed by the silence and the distance of my companions, by the many depths I found while the red pin points of their cigarette-ends still threaded up the dark ribbons below.

Maybe it was the silence that drew me, the same sense of retreat that drew early seekers to these icy regions. Irony then, that the paths they beat were now trodden by millions, the quiet refuge they found now marked by cheap artefacts sold at a hundred stalls, by shanty restaurants and pack mules, by the plastic debris of mass tourism.

Still, I walk these paths.

Over two decades ago, I journeyed with another seeker. On another autumn night, along another river. Chari opened the tiny wooden window of our ashram room in Bhojbasa on to a single silver star above the Bhagirathi peaks. A gentle white, painted with the faintest pink and shadowed by the deepest, darkest heavenly blue. How could these gigantic mountains rise into the night as gentle as a dream?

The next morning, Chari was quiet, increasingly intense as we neared the source of the Ganga, the cavernous ice cave of Gaumukh set in a towering glacial snout. Large as houses, blocks of green-tinged ice tumbled to the river bed, with crashes that drowned the rush of the infant stream, then melted back into it.

‘We’ve reached,’ he said. His words as deep with faith as any words I’ve heard; then he raced down the scree to the river, to stand cheering, exultant, upon a rock. This was a Chari I’d never seen before, or since. His was the soft voice of a doctor’s reassurance; the quiet assertion, the gentle bedside manner; even the way he rung my doorbell was special in his short softness. I hadn’t known Chari for long, but from our first meeting, our interaction had been effortless—gentle conversations about the joys of the mountains, long, easy silences, and a sharing of wide ranging music. One night, we had just heard the wild, stirring beauty of Peter Gabriel’s Passion, and sat quietly on my bedroom floor. ‘You know,’ I said, almost ashamed to break the silence,’ if there’s one trek I want to do, it is to Gaumukh, to the source of the Ganga’. An experienced trekker and accomplished climber, Chari looked at me and slowly allowed himself to smile: ‘That’s the only trek left that would mean anything to me.’

And so we had set off from Gangotri, the day after the Ganga temple had closed for winter, into a landscape of autumn leaves and cobalt skies. The infant Ganga was a chill, pale blue, and as we climbed the empty pilgrim’s trail, we left the last of the forest for a desert landscape of gray and brown. At the Bhojbasa ashram, Chari had wanted to engage the resident baba in conversation, but, busy in his kitchen, the arthritic old man had growled in return: ‘I am here to do, not to talk.’

And now we were high above the Ganga, at Tapovan, from where the Shivling peak swept up to its hooded summit. In her cave that night, the ‘Mai’, the holy woman of Tapovan, fed us with freshly fried puris and a potato curry, and answered Chari’s questions about the search that had brought her from a small town in hot and crowded Karnataka to this achingly desolate meadow swept by snow.

More. Chari always wanted to know more. In the after-dinner conversations we so relished, I had learned, piecemeal, of the spiritual search that began in his adolescence, and braided with the other thread of his life, his arduous training as a pediatric surgeon.  During the breaks in his medical education, his spiritual enquiry took him to the ashrams of Rishikesh in the north and Calcutta in the east. To Chennai - Madras at the time - in the south - where he was struck by the luminosity of a young monk. “You have found something”, he pleaded with the monk. “Share something with me.”   

“There is a deep joy to be found in meditating at dawn”, his young teacher told him.

Back in the hostel of his medical college, Chari took to waking at four, spending his first hours in silent contemplation, and earning himself the name by which I called him - ‘char’ being the Hindi word for four.

In every quiet tale he told, there were nuggets to be gleaned. I often asked him about his native Kashmir. Once he told me of the silent snows below Amarnath, where he had looked for a route to the holy cave long before the path was cleared for the ordinary pilgrim. When night fell, he was alone in the snowfields - alone, cold and lost. ‘That night, I lost my fear of death.’

In the Mai’s cave, the fire died, and she let the silence speak.

The next morning, Chari was suddenly restless, as though he needed to escape the intensity of Tapovan. We had planned to spend the day exploring the valleys to the north and west, but Chari’s need to leave was like a black hole. You couldn’t see it, but if you tried to engage with it,  it had an energy vastly greater than blazing suns. I had to step back. At that moment, it was if I would never be able to understand the man. “Something changed in Chari on that pilgrimage. Something so subtle I could never put my finger on it. And yet extremely powerful”, his wife would tell me.

A few nights later, as we shared the late streets of Malviya Nagar in Delhi with drunks and starving dogs, Chari reduced his life to the simple urge. ‘I want to find my guru. When will I find my spiritual guide?’

‘I have found my gurus,’ I told Chari,’ You, and the holy woman of Tapovan. And Jeevanti, my village neighbour, who laughs even as she and her children shiver in the winter cold of Kumaon. All those with whom I have travelled the path of my life; all those who have shared their homes and their hearts and their learning with me - teachers all.’

Chari smiled benignly, almost indulgently at me.

But in reply: ‘I want to meet my maker.’

Five years later we carried Chari’s ashes up the Ganga, in a time of winter silence. He was not yet 40.

“Shaant raho mere yaar,

Tu kya insaan tha,

Hum se pyaara Rab hai tera,

Sukh raho us paar”

He went in peace, my friend the pilgrim, in smiling acceptance of a sudden, savage cancer.

The Ganga had shrunk into sparse skeins of lapis and steel, knitted into a valley of ash gray and bone white. The road met my car tyres in a crunch of ice and rubble. Dry orange grass and  ice bordered the road. A single spire of smoke reached, oh so slender, for the skies.

We paused at the exquisite settlement of Harsil, two hours from our destination - the Ganga temple of Gangotri. Five years earlier, Chari and I had paused at this very spot on our way up to Gangotri. Now, the young junipers had grown into strapping youths, winter green against the crystal snow. Jagged Himalayan peaks flirted with winter clouds. Time to drive on, as we had then.

But it was not to be. Less than a minute out of Harsil, our car skidded. Black ice cloaked the road in danger, and when I got out to survey the surface, I realised Chari would never reach Gangotri again.

We turned back to park in Harsil. Silently, threaded through the stand of  junipers, and found our peace above the river. Kalyan drew an Om in the snow. I closed my eyes. And took an age to find my voice.

‘Om bhur bhava svaaha, Tatsavittar Varenaiyam

Bhargodevasya dhi mahi, Dhiyo yonah prachodaya svaha’

The strangely comforting sound of a chant whose meaning I only knew in translation:

“We meditate on the Supreme Sun whose light pervades this world, the heavens and the next world. May thy light guide our intellect in the right direction.”

I poured Chari’s ashes out of the clay pot, and watched them settle to the river bed.

As if from the crystal clarity of the mountain river, I heard Chari’s voice float up to me, from 5 years ago, from that autumn evening when we drove up to Gangotri: “Harsil—what a lovely place in which to spend some time… some other time.’

In a slow arc, I released the emptied clay pot to the river. It settled on a sand bank, and allowed the river to flow into it, and out.  Filling itself to the brim, yet welcoming more.

Never empty, never stale, always seeking more. My friend Chari - the eternal pilgrim.

Get off the footpath. Someone Really Important is Passing

Bandana studies in Grade 2. I saw her leaning over her copybook, as I cycled past the footpath on which she was perched, on the long straight of Delhi’s Outer Ring Road that separates IIT from the Rose Garden, and more recently, the works of the new metro station.

I slowed as I passed, then turned into the service lane between her intent form and the row of tents in which her family lived, among a clutch of migrant labour.  

Bandana’s head was unmoving, as her little hand laboured to copy the text of a textbook - “Bhaalu khelta hai football”. Her father welcomed me, in a dialect which I scarcely understood, but when I talked to her, she replied in the clear Hindi she learned in a government school.

“Where is the school?”

Her father pointed in the direction of Safdarjung Development Area.

“What’s it called?”

Her father looked helplessly at Bandana. She shrugged.

A neighbour brought a little stool out of his tent, and insisted I sit on it.

“You teach her”, the father suggested, his eyes filling with pride.

Her little brother Sudeep joined us, his eyes shining with the joy of childhood and a new mise en scene. He tested the brakes on my cycle, couldn’t quite figure the gear levers, so turned to doing cartwheels on the footpath. “Yes, he goes to school, too.”

The portly policeman stationed 50 meters up the road strolled over. He smiled tentatively, then strolled away.  2 minutes later, he returned.

“Move back to your tents”. His tone was surprisingly soft.

“VIP movement?” I asked, sympathetically.

He nodded, almost apologetic, as we watched our little knot, which had now grown to 3 children and 3 adults.

I asked Bandana whether the bear also played cricket. “No”, she said after great consideration. Sudeep grinned widely, and regarded me from between his legs, as he struck a new asana.

“I’d better be off”, I stretched to get up from the stool.

“You’d better move off the footpath now”, the policeman was a little firmer.

At the entrance to Panchshila Park, scores of policemen milled around. A fire tender straddled one home, an ambulance another. Around the corner, at the entrance to George Fernandes’ home, an entire platoon of safari-clad security personnel tried to look busy. Policemen hustled neighbouring homes to move their parked cars out of sight.

“Has something happened to Mr. Fernandes?”, I asked, knowing he’s been ailing for years.

“No. Someone is coming to visit him”

Someone very important, clearly.

And would that really important Someone really be upset to see little Bandana studying on the footpath along Outer Ring Road, while Sudeep cavorts in the cool air of an autumn morning?

Breaking the Male Stereotype

In my son's school, 10th grade boys said they were as much victims of stereo-typing by sex as girls, and felt the stress of having to live up to norms of what it means to be male. Their class teacher asked me to deliver a talk on the subject to an assembly of grades 6 to 12. This is it:

A stereotype was a plate made for printing a page of a book. These plates made sure that every copy of that page was the same - whether the book was printed a hundred times or several million.

Imagine a stereotype on a printing press turning out men - Man 1, Man 2, Man 3 - all the same - 500 million Indian men, all 6’5” tall, with big, long noses, all wearing kurta-pyjamas.

Oops - wrong stereotype! Throw the plate away.

Maybe this is the right one. 5’9” tall, slight paunch, leather briefcase, job in a bank, a wife, 2 kids. 

Hmm - Sounds right. Start printing. 1 million, 2 million, 3 million………...STOP! That’s getting boring.

Stereotypes are boring!!  Even more important, nature doesn’t use stereotypes - people are tall and short; thin and fat; fast and slow.

Some men are gentle, some, er, not quite so. The same for women - they said Indira Gandhi was the only man in her Cabinet - which tells you a lot about stereotypes.

Instead of stereotypes, let’s talk about LIFE.

Life is about being a person. Life is about loving, life is about learning, life is about playing..

Let’s begin with love - the love that all of you know best, the love between parent and child.

For a parent, to have a child is to know a flood of love, to want to hold, and protect, and bring joy. Why should this love know any lines between male and female? Such lines would lessen my joy, and my child’s.....

And so, full of this new love, I washed my child’s nappies; bathed him in a warm tub by the fireplace.

I built a pool for him, and taught him to swim in the Himalayan summer;

I rocked him to sleep - but in my own way -  dancing to Dave Matthews blasting from 4 foot high speakers.

When he woke, I fed him his favourite cashews; and, one September, strapped him on my back, and we walked him up to Pindari glacier for his 2nd birthday.

Where was I male, and where female? I was too busy enjoying being a parent to figure it out.

And then there’s learning

I was a pretty good student in school. All Dads say that - don’t they? But the one subject I consistently failed at was Art. So when we moved to the mountains, and Kedar would play in the garden all day, I decided to teach myself how to draw. I would spend hours at my stone bench, trying to make the squiggles of my pencil look like the tree trunk in front of me.

“The villagers must be wondering what to make of this rich old guy doing what schoolgirls do”,  my wife remarked. I’ll still probably fail at Art, but I learned a lot. Most of all, I deeply enjoyed those two years of sketching and water-colouring. And you know what, when we go back to our little cottage in the forest, I’m going to start sketching again.

Learning should be like love - it should know no boundaries. Certainly not the boundaries between commerce stream and science stream, and arts stream. I’m not knocking schools - Institutions need those boundaries to function efficiently.

But people don’t.

And the world - including the world of learning - is becoming more and more free. The IB curriculum breaks many of those walls down. The Liberal Arts colleges of the west allow you to flit from course to course.

For an adult learner, there is the whole wonderworld of online learning. MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, allow you to pick subjects, levels and teachers from all over the world. Over the last year-and-a-half, I have taken on-line courses in

• The Physiology of the Athlete.
• Pricing of Financial Assets
• Coding for Dummies, and
• Irrational Behaviour

And Live courses in meditative dancing and tai chi.

Break the Stereotype.

And finally, Playing

Benjamin Franklin said “Most people die at 25, but aren’t buried till they’re 75”.

He was probably exaggerating a bit, but I think he had a point - at a certain age, people fall into a rut, a comfortable one. Even if it’s not too comfortable, you tell yourself - "Sure, I hate this rut, but the others may be even worse, so maybe I should just bump along in this one, and become what Pink Floyd called ‘Comfortably Numb'"

For most people, this rut is - work, family, TV, dinner, sleep. Rinse and repeat.

And what about play? Most adults forget the joy of play. And when their doctor tells them at age 40 that they need to lose weight, the gym becomes this daily torture required to survive.

What a shame! Play is joy - as much a part of life as loving and learning.

Question: When do we become too old to play?

Answer: Never!

Some of you may have heard of this race called the Iron Man. It begins with a 3.8 km swim (that’s about 150 lengths of your school pool), followed by 180 km. of cycling (from here to Jaipur, roughly), and a 42 km. run. You begin at 7 a.m., and If you’re not done by midnight - 17 hours - you’re out. My star Iron athlete is an 84 year-old Christian nun. You heard me right, an 84 year-old nun, called Sister Madonna, who last year became the oldest person ever to complete an Ironman.

So much for the Man in the name, Ironman, So much for stereotypes.

In all of this, I am not saying there are no stereotypes. There are.

But if you want to be happy, be yourself.

Live outside the stereotypes.

Live outside the box.

Remember - each of us is Unique. Each of us - Male or Female -  is Special.

Happiness is found in being ourselves.

More and More of  ourselves each day.

Every day, say “I will be true to myself”

That way lies honesty; that way lies happiness. 

Maybe even Greatness.

Thank You.

Start Up, Boom!!

MONEY BUYS HALF?

Before money became cheap, ideas and sweat got no more than half the business.

No longer.

In the brave new world of start-ups, we investors are lucky if money buys us a fifth. Over the last couple of years, the share of the angel is trending lower and lower; today, funding an idea for the next year will typically buy you only 15% of a business.

If the relative valuation of any two goods or services changes this radically, it means that the dynamics of demand and supply have shifted. In the start-up eco-system, there doesn’t seem to be a scarcity of ideas - quite the opposite in fact - so one can only conclude that money is flooding into the market. Partly, this is the demonstration effect of start-ups like Ola Cabs becoming unicorns at the speed of white magic, tempting lots of people with spare cash to try on the garb of angels. The other ingredient of the start-up fever is the flood of cheap money washing over the globe ever since the 2008 crash.

Much as the macro-economist in me rails against monetary inflation, I am hugely excited by the role it has played in sparking thousands of dreams of new businesses, getting bright young people to quit their jobs and take to the road of entrepreneurship. It is a journey of great learning for these young founders, and even the tiniest start-up creates a few jobs. The successful ones create employment by the thousands, and could be the job engine our growing nation desperately needs.

Exciting as this start-up fever is, it is poisoned by the danger of over-blown expectations. A large number of young people have hit the road with little more than a business idea and the beta version of an app, and believe they need a crore of rupees (often stated as 200,000, meaning USD) to take them to the next stage of their business. The word on the streets of start-up town is that founders shouldn’t dilute too early, so this kind of money won’t buy more than 15% equity, which means that the business idea, plus a few lakhs worth of time and money, is being valued at more than 6 crores.

For an angel, investing at these valuations must be compared with returns in public equity. Given my historical returns on equity, I would set this hurdle at 18% per annum. If the new businesses I invest in continue to attract high valuations based on the prospect of growth, I  could see profitable exit opportunities at every successive funding round - from Bridge to Series A, Series B… etc. Series F is not unheard of. At the same time, one must remember that both founders and early investors are going to get diluted at every stage.

The number of mathematical scenarios is literally infinite. The one that I generated looked at angels being diluted to half their initial stake by Year 5, and a valuation at 4 to 5 times turnover. For my hurdle rate to then be achieved, the business needs to scale a turnover of 1 crore in Year 2, double in Year 3, and grow by 50% each for the next two years. From the perspective of founders, this is chicken-shit, and no young IIT-IIM team with stars in their eyes is looking at less than 50 crores by Year 5.

In the days of boot-strapped start-ups, growing a business from 0 to 5 crores in 5 years was well-nigh impossible. Start-up funding should - and does - vastly improve the odds, by providing financial fuel and sage counsel. As a result, many new businesses will hit that number, or more. But for every multi-bagger success, there will be several which run into execution problems, unforeseen competition, or a need to drastically reassess their business strategy (‘pivot’ as it’s called). Addressing these issues will require more money (read dilution), time (while my hurdle meter is ticking away), and a slowing, or even reversal, of growth. And even though I hate to admit it, the fact is that less than one new business in five returns its capital.

All considered, the start-up environment is at the far frontiers of high-risk, high-reward. Assessing the abilities of the start-up team will help mitigate that risk, as will the involvement of seasoned managers with major business decisions. However, till I have more experience of this eco-system, I am going to strictly limit my financial exposure to what I can afford to lose.

We don’t know how long the flood of cheap money facilitates the current scenario. If it ebbs, valuations at every stage will drop, and businesses with weak growth will hit the wall in terms of further funding. Clearly, this is not a development I would welcome. But is one we must all consider, especially founders who are writing business plans with rounds of successive funding, into the blue horizon.

The life of a landscape

Cresting the last slope up to the lip of the quarry, Bhardwaj lake was muddy brown, a colour we've never encountered in over two years of swimming.

"Panchshila Club for us, I guess."

But, by force of habit, and the inertia of a journey almost completed, we continued along the rocky ridge, then clambered down a trail marked by cowpats and goat droppings, harshly punctured by kikar thorns, to the beach from which we swim out every week, from late February till nigh on Christmas.

In the week since we were last there, the landscape had vastly altered, a huge tongue of clay had riven the beach in two, and between two spits of sand, flat as if laid by an artist's pallette knife, a marbled abstract of camel and toffee and chocolate squelched under foot. The water lapping the beach was laden with debris, darkened sprigs of vegetation uprooted from the slopes by rain water, mud and rocks. Hardly inviting, but "since we are here..."

Fifty meters out, the water was merely murky and I could see as far as the wrists of my arm, now settled into the smooth strokes of a dawdling crawl. We flopped onto our backs and savoured the quiet, the textured skies, and the cool drops that were beginning to drizzle down. The rain washed the morning heat out of the air, the lake felt warmer, and just above its flat brown surface, rain drops splintered into a fine cushion of silvery mist, painting the far cliff with a sense of mystery. We bathed our eyes in the fresh rain, swam some, then floated some, stroked back to shore, then out again, loth to leave this bowl of watery beauty, that was strangely restful and energising at the same time.

Our clothes were sodden with rain, its patter now so insistent that it made little sense to put them on. We shrugged our packs onto our bare backs, laced our shoes on without socks, and stepped into the river of clay, now turning insistently liquid. The cliffs of sand on either side had turned crumbly, and little slides were triggered at random. To our left, the cliff was a determined face of quartz, roughly hewn. To the right, a hundred meters of mud and clay and rock and keekar shrubs was already shifting. "That buffalo-sized rock was halfway up the slope a minute ago", Puneet pointed out to us.

We clambered and slithered up the paths that had now become viaducts of rain and slush - some red, some brown, some grey; some thin skeins of shallow water, one already a stream that  threatened to dislodge a foot seeking purchase on a rocky path that had disappeared from view. Below us, the clay was creeping over the water, a viscous growing tongue of desert brown. On the opposite cliff, a huge cascade of water gushed grey and white-horsed down a rocky slope, carrying sludge and boulders. "Extreme kayaking, you think?" Mo asked. "Extremely extreme.."

"There's another waterfall", Dinesh pointed. And another....all draining into our favourite swimming spot. The Bhati landscape, familiar in its aridity and stillness, was now a living, pulsating being, a hundred streams, a thousand gradients, a million rocks; an automata turned on by a hidden puppet master. To torment or to delight? We turned left, following a primeval cry. A cowherd, stripped to his loincloth, was silhouetted atop an outcrop of rock, silvery with rapid water, his face turned up to the skies.

We threaded right, seeking easier passage. The shifting landscape had conjured up a massive pond, submerging the shrubs that marked our path home. "That way, I think", I stepped out into the water, to my knees, to my chest, to my neck. I floated into a cautious dog paddle. A thorny shrub grasped at my calf,
a rock scraped my knee. Is the path to the left, or should I veer around to that knoll? Keep heart. Steady as you find soil underfoot.

Play on. And thank you for the magic.

Risk, Reward and (Old) Age

I love rewards.

If you don’t, you can stop reading right now.

The key thing about looking for rewards is - there is no such thing as a sure winner.

In other words, if you want to be rewarded for your investments, you have to take risks.

You probably know that equities offer high returns, even after accounting for the inflation that is chronic in India. This is quite unlike the crappy ‘safe’ investments like bank deposits, which yield negative returns after you account for taxes and inflation.

So, I’m not writing this to sell the equities story. I’m writing to ask you to consider how you deal with investing, aging, and retirement. Most investment advisers write out a prescription that says - “Patient approaching retirement - recommended he reduce his exposure to equities.” Many will even trot out a handy little formula that says “Percentage exposure to equities = 100- Age in years.”

These advisers, and their formula, are wrong: maths is maths, and fixed deposits give you negative real returns, whether you are retired or working. In fact, when you are working, salary or  professional income will usually keep up with price levels. When you are retired, this cost-of-living adjustment will have to come from investments, and ‘safe’ investments, like fixed deposits, don’t do that.

Then there is the question of how you view ‘retirement’. I view it as a time to  indulge in all my leisure activities - music, theater, travel, outdoor sports, and time with friends. It helps that I retired at 40, but I’m as passionate about these activities as I near 60, and intend to be for a long, long time. This stuff costs! And it costs more as you grow older.

Till a few years ago, I would stuff myself in the cheapest airline seat and fly off to Canada to walk a snowfield in spring. Today, my muscles cramp up on long flights, and I relish the ability to fly business class. When my wife and I moved into a stone cottage in the Himalayan foothills, I landscaped the garden myself, with a shovel and a spade; today, if I want a flower-bed to be shifted, I contract a village neighbour to do it. Two decades ago, we would spend the winter huddled in our sleeping bags next to the fireplace; today, we are drawing up plans for a modern heating system, double-glazing, and insulation in the roof.

You get the picture - 60, or even 70, is too young to give up one one’s passions, but they cost a lot more. If you want these rewards at the end of a productive life, you need the ‘risks’ of equity.

You notice I put the word risk in quote-marks - that is because the only risk is short-term volatility. In years of deep macro-economic crisis, as we saw in 2007-09, shares can take a huge beating, and if one is new to the game, one can be scared away for a long time - perhaps for ever. But, if one is investing for the long-term, for one’s 70s, 80s, and even 90s, this volatility is just the noise in a signal that produces a very healthy long-term growth in one’s net worth, in the region of 15% per annum. The only learning from the short-term beating is to have a couple of years’ worth of living expenses in low (negative) return investments - to tide over the time when shares are selling below their trend value.

So, here’s my formula - Indian equities should give you a minimum of 12% return over the mid- to long-term. Add 1% by way of dividend, and subtract 7-8% for inflation, so you’re talking 5-6% real return. This means that you can safely extract 5% of your portfolio value every year to meet your living needs, while preserving the real value of the equities for the years to follow.

If you began investing in equities early enough, or if you receive retirement benefits from your employer, you could well find at 60 that you don’t need to draw all of that 5%; maybe 2% is enough, or 3. What do you then?

This is a wonderful problem to have, and you have three choices: One is to spend more! The second is to succumb to the ‘safety’ trap, and convert some of your equities into fixed-income securities. The third is to climb further up the risk-reward curve!

I just exercised the last option.  I’m beginning to get bored of the predictable returns from my equity portfolio, and have begun to invest in start-up businesses. Risky business, these start-ups, but 30 years of equity investing gives you that stomach for risk. And, with a little bit of luck, I’ll be enthusiastic enough at 70 to enjoy the rewards this new journey into risk will bring.

Can you really help a fool

'Fool' is a strong word, and I don't use it lightly.

Prakash is about 50, and has worked with my family, off and on, for some 30 years now. He is a good manual worker, but has not acquired any skills beyond a dogged ability to clean the flat surfaces of our home, and water the plants. When he has taken leave, he has disappeared for months, and we have been forced to look for other help. For most of the last 20 years, we have been his fall-back employers, having him come in for a couple of hours in the morning, while he spent the day in a succession of other jobs.

When my mother passed away in 2011, she had willed him Rs. 30,000. My sister, Kanika, felt the money should be used to help him secure a home in Delhi, since Prakash owns no land in his village. When he said he could procure a 'jhuggi' for 1,50,000, Kanika said she would take the amount up to 1 lakh; I volunteered the balance. It turned out, Prakash was completely out of touch with the market, and there was nothing to be had for under Rs. 2.5 lakh. Eventually, I bought him a small piece of land in Sangam Vihar for just under 3 lakhs, on which he said he would build a room.

As the months went buy, it became clear that Prakash could not mobilise the money to build; our chauffeur interceded on his behalf, and I agreed to pay a mason for the construction. The space allowed for a single room 10 feet by 15 feet, with a small toilet tucked under the stairs leading to the roof. During the construction, Prakash decided he didn't want the loo in the space, so as to allow for more elbow room. "We'll use the fields" he said. Kanika and I suggested the loo would make for a more comfortable home, but the man was adamant. And it is his home.

A few months later, Prakash approached me for some more money, to build the loo on the roof. The amount was not significant, but I was concerned about whether the structure would handle it; he said he had spoken to the mason, and with a low brick wall and a tin roof, the load would be insignificant. I gave him the money.

Now, the roof has cracked with the load. I don't know whether the mason was involved in the loo retrofit, or whether it was a typical jugaad. Now, I don't know whether to feel responsible, and pick up the pieces, or walk away, having done 'enough'.

I typically get very angry when my wife says those poor remain poor who have bad behaviour patterns. I believe that it takes a couple of generations of interacting with the modern world to pick up rational decision-making abilities; I know that extreme poverty leads to short-term decision making. And yet, among the staff we employ between our home in Delhi and those in our mountain home - all village-born and bred - we see such a huge spectrum of behaviour.

Several of our employees set savings practices into play very early in their lives, and have now accumulated reasonable sums to deploy for their childrens' future and their own old age. Ironically, they probably won't need much of this money, because the children have proved to be responsible individuals, who've gone through school, groomed themselves for better lives, and will, I believe, look after their parents when they are old.

The very parents who have been feckless with their money have irresponsible children, who dropped out of school, can't hold jobs, and treat their parents as a convenience. The children have made no progress up the socio-economic ladder, and are extremely likely to be of any support to their parents in their old age. It seems as if you just can't trump genetics, even with a fair amount of will and a reasonably generous wallet.