Letting Go, Yet Again...

It has been a weekend of coming to terms.  It is time to let go, yet again. It is clear that this investment has gone terribly wrong.  The more I think about the details and the developments the more I am convinced that I did not read the entrails right.

I think my wife Lakshmi has been right in warning me of the impending folly of it all.

I am not new to letting go.  More than two years ago, I wrote another post about letting go.  http://sgchalayil.blogspot.in/2012/07/letting-go.html

This time around things are a little different though.  For one, I know the agony and the remorse will remain.  More importantly there are lessons that I will need to remember for the rest of my life.

It all started with a silly Mallu movie a while back, while I was down with a terrible viral fever that sapped not just my body.  It seems to have muddled up my brain too.  The events that unfolded in its wake over the many months that followed  have churned my insides most, as I tried to hang on to sanity and reason, much as a rafter would hang on to his fragile dinghy as he negotiated the fury of the white water rapids.

I cannot afford another one of these mistakes.  The "** lessons" will be a constant reminder to me for sometime now, of the perils and pain of a foolish investment.

It is time for me to go off air, at least for a while.  I will miss writing these posts.  I do not know if you will miss reading them.

Nanni....Namaskaaram.

On Achievement or the Lack of It

What, if anything, have I achieved in life?  How do I measure achievement?  A recent incident involving a dear friend brought these questions into focus.

I guess it is possible to measure achievement by the way it is recognised by the external world.  Awards, accolades or popular recognition of what an individual has done is one measure.  I get the impression that increasingly the world seems to value achievement measured in terms of these metrics.

The other measure is what one has accomplished, such as a great feat in sport, or solving an important problem using one's intellect, or making life better for others through one's actions or the wealth one has accumulated and so on. 

There is an external dimension to this idea of achievement too.  The significance of an achievement here is measured in terms of some pre-existing frame of reference or standard of achievement.

Thus one might accumulate more wealth than the currently wealthiest person or break a new record in sports or find a neat mathematical proof that has eluded everyone else so far.

On a more sublime plane our spiritual masters appear to have raised the whole idea of greatness to an absolutely objective level.  A seeker in spiritualism is supposed to know when he or she has turned into a "realised" soul.  There are no relative yardsticks here. There are realised souls and there are the others.  There is no need for any external validation either.

Very often the second notion of achievement leads to the first.  That said, from time to time, one comes across extraordinary instances of individuals taking particular care to avoid any public recognition for various different reasons.  Those are truly great individuals in my opinion whose achievement has been driven by what I would describe as purity of purpose.

Those in the third category are past caring about recognition anyway. They are so past caring that they perhaps do not even take the trouble to avoid or receive recognition.

On the first and the third metrics I do not have much to show anything by way of achievement.  That leaves the second measure:  Have I done anything significant?

So I ask myself:  As an investment professional did I produce a significant amount of wealth that few others did?  Have I made any extraordinary investment that is like nothing else that anyone else has done?  As an academic now how much do I know about a subject that I can claim there are things I know, problems I can solve that many others cannot?  How long can I hold forth on a subject, any subject, before I flake up?  As a citizen what I have done to improve the welfare for someone with whom I have no family, social or emotional connection?

All things considered I veer round to the view that I have led a shallow life all these years. I have not achieved or accomplished anything in my now long life.

Consequently I do not even know what it means to have achieved anything significant in life by any of the three yardsticks above.  My ignorance of the agony and the ecstasy of achieving reminds me of one of the few poems that I ever learned at my father’s insistence.  (Pasted at the end for ease of reading) 

Like the blind boy who did not know that wonderful thing called light I do not know how it feels to have achieved anything.

There are two differences though:  The blindness of the boy was wrought by God.  My lack of achievement is my own doing (or the lack of it.)  Second, I cannot justifiably say what the blind boy says at the end:  But sure with patience I can bear, a loss I never can know.  My lack of achievement is a loss I cannot live down. 

I can go on and on, at the risk of appearing to wallow in self-pity.  But I guess I have made the point.

Nanni....Namaskaaram


O say what is that thing called Light,
Which I must never enjoy;
What are the blessings of the sight,
O tell your poor blind Boy!

You talk of wondrous thing you see;
You say the sun shines bright;
I feel him warm, but how can he
Or make it day or night?

My day or night myself I make
Whenever I sleep or play:
And could I ever keep awake
With me 'twere always day.

With heavy sighs I often hear
YOu mourn my hapless woe;
But sure with patience I can bear
A loss I never can know.

Then let not what I cannot have
My cheer of mind destroy;
Whilist thus I sing, Iam a King,
Although a poor blind Boy

My Soros moment

George Soros is not the most liked human perhaps.  But a colleague once remarked to me once when I felt sad about the way I was being attacked by my detractors:  Sabari, if you are good at what you do, you are bound to be hated by a few, unless you are in Mother Teres's business.  My business of early stage investing had little in common with the divine work of those nuns in the Missionaries of Charity.

I have considered myself to be a reasonably good long term investor.  Over the years I have accumulated enough evidence to be able to say that on average I can more often call investments correctly than otherwise.

I attribute this to a disciplined approach to investment.  When I look at a deal I am an unfeeling automaton.  I have also heard people say that I am like a possessed creature, impervious to human sensibilities and focussed exclusively on the minutiae of the business on hand.

I have followed this disciplined approach to social relationships, except when it comes to my parents, parents in law and siblings on my wife's side and mine.

I have also believed in what investment parlance would be called concentrated bets.  The central principle in this style of investing is as follows:  Take your time picking your investments.  Once you are convinced of your thesis, throw large chunks of your wealth on to that asset.

It is this conviction based investment that made me like venture capital investing.  Like in venture capital investing this approach to life has left me with a small portfolio of relationships.

I take a long time to like anyone well enough.  Once I am convinced of my liking I allocate a large part of my emotional capital to that relationship.  Like a patient long term investor I give it all I have.  I invest my time capital to make it work because healthy and happy relationships need a lot of nurturing.


In the early days of the deal you are hovering around the investee all the time, making sure you made the right investment.  Making sure that this deal would work indeed.

You did not care at that time how the other party felt about your constant presence.  You had this great sense of responsibility to yourself and the investee that made you believe that this was no time for social niceties.  That there was much too much riding on the deal for both parties.  And that you knew how to make it work.

Consistent with the risky nature of venture capital investing, there are times when a few such investments look like a losing proposition, when the party of the other part to the relationship seems to drift away from the central premise of the relationship.  Like a cousin who goes off to a far away land and does not look back for a while.  Or a friend with whom you dont share a world view any more.

I fret and grieve over those lemons a lot.  But then like elsewhere in the world of concentrated bets, here too winning some and losing others is business as usual.  And like a bruised child you cringe in a corner, whimpering, before you pick yourself up to ask the more mature question of where you went wrong.

So what is it about Soros and myself in this piece, you well might wonder.

Soros was the scourge of many a government.  He was the enfant terrible of currency markets.  He thought it his birthright to be unreasonable, it would appear.  Without realising what I was doing over time  as an investor I seemed to have embraced some of his qualities. 

It is another matter that I did not achieve the scale of his wealth, success or his global stature.  But then it is not every child who sports a Sachin hair style that ends up becoming a master blaster.  Equally, mythology has only one Ekalavya who could have potentially excelled his Guru.

I remembered Soros a great deal in the past few days as I recalled that even he had to admit eventually in the late nineties that he had "lost it" as an investor.  The mighty had fallen.

And so had I.  Or so it would appear, at least.

My investments in Life have been coming unstuck lately.  I seem to have hit a Soros moment in my life.  And as is common with concentrated bets, these dud deals are burning serious holes in my emotional networth. 

Which makes me wonder if like all retired investors I should settle down to merely harvest those few wise investments I seem to have made in the past.  And not attempt any more new investments.

Good night....I hope you can see that I have still not recovered enough to sign off with my customary Nanni and Namaskaarams.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

I have lost count of the number of times I listened to this song today.  I zeroed in on it after casting about the wilderness of Youtube looking for something that would quieten my own troubled spirit.  Here is a link to this song, if you have not heard it before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_a46WJ1viA

I have been at it nearly all day as I mechanically plodded on, grading one wrong answer after another from a mid term exam I held recently.  The woes of grading those answers appear insignificant in comparison to the other turbulence in my heart.

It has been my day of troubled waters.  Of pain that seems to torch through my very marrows and turn them into hopeless cinders.  A day on which the realisation of my foolishness hit me in full force as I rubbed open my sleepy eyes in the morning.  My incompetence as an investor in Life stood exposed plainly all of a sudden.  The sadness of non-attainment engulfed me in one suffocating pall. 

I am not new to foolishness, remorse or pain in any combination.  But never have I drowned those moments of misery in escapisms like inebriation, although I have been a reckless tippler for brief periods in my life.

I have struggled all alone always, ploughing through the treacherous quicksands of each episode of such misery in the past.

This time around how I wish I could talk to someone about it. But how does that help? Conversations in such moments are much like a fix.  They give you a transient reprieve.  And then the misery back comes back.  With renewed vigour, like a rebelling torrent that has been struggling to break free from an unwelcome dam on its fierce path.

Strangely, for the religious man that I consider myself to be, even Prayer does not seem to help.  It is perhaps because of the childish remorse that the Lord did not want you to go down that path to start with.  But then you are supposed to go back to Him whenever you need Him.  Like a child in pain running back to its mother.

Like I have done many times in the past.  Only to realise that this Mother chooses when to offer succour.  Often it is on Her terms.

I know this too shall pass. As those few others in the past.  But would some bit of me have died with it?  What would that bit be?  Would it be the cankerous elements that I should have exorcised long back?  I hope so.

Right now all that I can think of is that morning when I will hopefully wake up, free from the dull ache that I cannot seem to put behind.  Or hope that the Bridge Over Troubled Waters will be more than just a song.  And that someone will lie himself or herself down to help me walk across the swirling waters that seem to want to swallow me.

Too pained to offer my customary closing salutations...