I will get to the point straight. ‘The Complete Maus’ by Art Spiegelman is one of the best things I have ever read. I wonder why didn’t I read it long ago. For those who haven’t, the premise of the graphic novel is that Arthur (the author/illustrator) is talking to his father Vladek Spiegelman through some months/years and writing this very book. Vladek is a Polish Jew and a Holocaust Survivor.
Art describes Jews as Mice, Nazis as Cats, and other nationalities also as anthropomorphic.
The relationship depiction of the father-son duo is absolutely terrific. I mean, I could go on about how relatable this is and how truthful it might be across the world, but I don’t really want to go there at this moment.
Despite having watched plethora of World War 2 related movies, included some of the best works like Schindler’s List, Son of Saul, (and even Inglorious Bastards), this take still shakes you to the core when Vladek describes what happened back then. How he and his wife Anja got separated, met again, again got separated and eventually sent to Auschwitz and somehow survived, is thrilling, moving, emotional, and leaves you hopeful.
Even thinking of what some people had to go through gives one shudders. Although World War 2 is now something which happened 75+ years ago, humans haven’t really evolved and time and again we come across similar behaviors. Reading this reminds one of the horrors again.
The highlight for me is however the relationship between the writer and the father who has been so much. I strongly strongly recommend everyone to read this. This is one of the best out there.
Sometimes you come across some books rather late in life (relatively) and wonder why you didn’t read this earlier!
This book is one of those books. ‘Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman’ is an autobiography of sorts. It has chapters from Physicist Dr. Richard Feynman’s earliest days when his curiosity led him to experiment and eventually becoming a scientist, to his stint in the Manhattan Project, and his teaching days and general philosophy in life.
Nobel Prize winning scientist Richard P. Feynman was one of the most interesting characters the field of Physics has produced. He was referenced a lot in ‘The Big Bang Theory’ but I didn’t take notice. But when he made an appearance in the movie ‘Oppenheimer’ playing bongos when the Trinity Test was done, I thought to delve into this book I had only heard praises about.
The title of the book is perfect because some of the stories are absurd. It can also come across as eccentric or even arrogance but one needs to read it objectively. For instance, when the Nobel Prize was announced for Feynman, he jokes about how weird he felt accepting it and meeting the royalty of Sweden. His relationship and general opinion about Humanities are very relatable even today as the world is trying to react to the advent of the Wokeism culture.
What I liked the most was his approach to understand anything! Rote Learning which we suffer from thanks to our educational system has been criticised a lot in this book. He stresses on not remembering definitions or terms, but understanding the concepts.
On a totally different spectrum, he details his adventures of learning new languages, traveling to Brazil and Japan, and being a frequent to pubs and making friends and girlfriends, as if a comedy show is being played out. It would actually be a very interesting one if someone adapts to a biographical TV show.
I enjoyed reading this and would like to read other non technical books of his. I have also heard a lot about the Feynman Lectures where his Physics Lectures were videographed. Anyways the interviews of Richard Feynman are equally interesting.
Dropping your kid to school for the first time is an experience in itself.
*wait I will continue this in a minute after taking a deep breath and seems like something is in my eyes*
It is slightly easier if the pre-school is just a stone’s throw away but leaving them there on their own is like someone grabbing your intestines and twisting them a bit gently.
We have been prepping her for a year by showing the school to her so she didn’t face any difficulty in adjusting to the place. Just being a new parent and adjusting to not seeing her around is challenging. Handing over your biggest asset to strangers and then trusting them fully is something to learn. You think you can focus but your mind keeps going back to school. imagining if your kid is safe there or did you just hear her crying?
When I was sent to a school I know I must have cried buckets. Kids nowadays are built differently. Even schools are built differently and aren’t the same old dingy lit dungeons where a dragon (the teacher) is sitting there to split you open and gorge on your insides. Now they are airy, well-lit, and full of attractive toys to lure your kids. I hardly heard any teacher shouting at kids. And as I stay *literally* opposite that school, if they do shout, I will get her back instantly. *Eminem’s mockingbird song comes to mind*
As I write this waiting outside to pick her back up, the teacher told me she vomited after crying a bit but she is totally fine now.
There was always an ongoing joke when I was growing up that if the weather forecast says it would rain, it definitely won’t rain. If they say, the day will be sunny, high chance that it will rain cats and dogs. Fortunately, the accuracy of weather prediction has come a long way and it is indeed really accurate nowadays. But forecasting remains a funny topic.
I spent the majority of the last 3 years working in forecasting for retailers. The algorithms take historical sales and inventory data and after applying a bunch of data science models, generate forecasts for the next few seasons. When it comes to retail, it is generally safe to assume that for mature market societies, patterns generally repeat seasonally. Thus, the forecasts more or less are pretty accurate. Of course, when drastic events happen, all forecasts go haywire but even those are nowadays taken into account and predictability takes into account such shocks and comes up with good predictions.
You cannot apply forecasting easily to many other things like Share Market, although people try their best to do so. Gambling and Betting on Sports play on human emotions and greed more than luck and forecasting abilities, I think. Another field that deals with prophecy is Astrology. It is beyond me that horoscopes are given such a big place in newspapers and people take pride in being from such and such zodiac signs. I can go on and on about this but let me not digress.
I recently read Morgan Housel’s ‘Same as Ever’. He surely is one of the most known writers nowadays who knows how to drive a point using stories. His earlier book The Psychology of Money was also a best seller and is often quoted. He explains, in this book, that no matter how much we can predict and play with numbers and emotions, some things never change and that is Human Behavior. Time and again, people do the same things, make the same mistakes, learn from the same mistakes, and the cycle goes on. Societies or individuals go through cycles of ups and downs and initially, we forget what we did then but later we realize. It tells that the world remains unpredictable and human attempts to tame it remain the same. Mediums might change but the primal urge to react to things hasn’t evolved much since our ancestors also reacted and adapted to changes in the same way.
It might sound pessimistic but rather the book strengthens the belief that if we have got into trouble, it is also the human ingenuity that can pave the way forward. I felt that it encourages us to experiment and use previous knowledge to come up with new solutions because even if nature cannot be predicted, people’s behavior remains the same.
As I mentioned earlier, I have been following Housel’s blog https://collabfund.com/blog/ for some time and all his writings and storytelling are highly enjoyable. Like ‘Psychology of Money’, I recommend ‘Same as Ever’ as a compelling book about the psychology of people.
[AD] ‘Same as Ever’ by Morgan Housel can be bought from here:
To atone for the crime of watching the movie ‘Mohenjo Daro’, that too alone in a theatre, I will read 2000 books related to Indus Valley Civilization, I had promised. This is 1st of such.
Just kidding. There are not many interesting books about Indus Valley Civilization anyway.
Growing up with Comics and working as a graphic designer for a few years, if something is presented visually, it naturally becomes interesting and appealing, as far as I am concerned.
The People of Indus: and the birth of civilization in South Asia by Nikhil Gulati is one such wonderful book which presents information visually through the medium of cartooning about the advent, the peak, and eventual decline of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). I came across this book in one of the Podcasts from Puliabaazi.
History is assumed to be taught in such a bland manner that most people think of it as a boring thing. I, however, was blessed to have good school teachers who tried their best to make it interesting, within the constraints of the school syllabus and the time allowed. Also, thanks to my grandfather who had translated a number of books related to history (or rather decolonization, as they say, to be specific), my interest always remained aligned to learn more about history. But, all the books mostly had text. There have been a handful of photos in black and white as if nobody had access to a color camera ever. This book certainly piqued my attention as for the first time ever history is shown in a medium I enjoy.
What this book does is to enhance the knowledge about IVC by presenting various aspects about how life could’ve been between 3000-2000 BC. It goes through the familiar seals and mini-statues of the IVC. It also talks a lot about how that civilization interacted with the other nearby civilizations like Mesopotamia and the gulf. It goes into detail about one peculiar aspect that IVC has had no signs of any battles and the hierarchical structure of the society was governed by commerce.
I liked the aspects that it touches daily lives, the commercial as well as social processes and the possible languages of the period. It doesn’t try to extrapolate information and shows the evidence as they are.
Since I have had some interest about this so some facts were already known. It didn’t shock me, if I was expecting that. But it does expands the knowledge horizons and acts as a good refresher certainly.
It’s interesting that even now artefacts are found across the north and western plains of India and sadly some of the major sites are now in Pakistan. Rakhigarhi chariot, fortunately was found near Delhi. Aryan Migration/Invasion theories are being challenged regularly with more and more studies being done which suggests that Indian DNA has been generally the same across the subcontinent even though people try to divide us. As far as the mystery of the language of IVC is concerned, that is yet to be deciphered which keeps some secrets as secrets. I recently also read an article that they might not mean anything religious at all, although Shiva has been mentioned on the seals sometimes. Anyways, theories will change as we become better at genes study and archaeology gets more traction.
I enjoyed this book and hope that it might trigger others to start showing mundane concepts graphically, thereby making them interesting. Surely, if this is shown to school kids and young adults, they would be more inclined to know more about Indians from the bye gone era which still has impacts and make us what we are.
This book can be bought from Amazon from this link [ad]
When I was growing up, discussions of shares and stocks, Interest Rates, Sensex, and Money in general, were as alien to me, as Machiavellianism is to Rahul Gandhi. In my family, the discussions at the dinner table were mostly related to *wait-for-it* just dinner. On the contrary, some of my close friends knew about all these financial terms and games very well. I liked to believe that it could be a caste thing. But then it turned out that being money-minded and knowledgeable about Finance isn’t a crime but rather a necessity in life.
I recently read that the author of ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ Robert Kiyosaki was himself under a debt of billions of dollars. Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money also made it clear that it is one thing to earn money, but it is a different thing to gain wealth. And to gain anything, one needs to be smart with money.
I kept delaying understanding finance and the nitty-gritty of markets and thought of myself as a Nerd who felt elated only when some PSLV took off, or when India’s run rate went up and not when the market went bullish or bearish. This continued even when I started earning. However, the reality that some smart people do spend time planning their finances pretty early in life, hit me when my bank balance remained, even after years of working, in the figures that looked more like an OTP and less like a Mobile Phone Number.
But one cannot remain ignorant for long. I did start learning about things slowly and steadily and learned to save and invest in safe havens, where risk is minimal. I also came across help from friends and acquaintances who told me a thing or two. One grudge I always had is that Articles and Videos I came across had so much jargon that I would watch Chess or Golf instead.
But times have changed, YouTube nowadays has a plethora of good information in a language you can easily understand. There are shorts and reels as well, in which people dance and tell you which Mutual Fund for how long would make you a Crorepati. There are playlists after playlists you can watch and become an expert yourself and start your own finance-related podcasts. Kids nowadays (sigh) have become much more knowledgeable due to the rise of Fintechs than surely my age group.
I wanted to remove the clutter and learn things slowly (or rather reconfirm my understanding) that come from some experts who could break down things into a not-so-complicated manner and give information without ads. That can happen only with a Book.
I came across The Bee, the Beetle, and the Money Bug: The Bankbazaar Guide to the Financial Wild by Adhil Shetty and A.R. Hemant. I have known the co-author @arhemant since Minimal Movie Posters days. I found this book a pretty good primer in explaining a lot of things that can be beneficial to a salaried employee like me who is between 30-40 or even younger. It also convinced me that I am not an idiot after all and some decisions which I had taken early in my career were rather good. It also gave me insights about what can I do now to secure the next 20-30 years and beyond as I am now reaching the middle of my career (mid-life-crisis is looming large). If one has a family to support, this book does cover whatever options are available at this point at our disposal.
To summarize, it is late but never too late to take stock of our finance-related knowledge. This book (and nowadays there are several such books) can help anyone who is looking to learn personal finance and see through the noise.
Here are some of my notes with a disclaimer like they say:
Please read the offer documents clearly as everything below is subject to market risks. This is not an investment advice blog. Or any advice blog for that matter.
Emergency Fund
Anything can happen to anyone at any time. So, try to have at least six times your monthly income as an Emergency Fund in a secure but liquid fund such as a Fixed Deposit. One needn’t complicate this but aim to review this as salary increases. When created at the same bank, FDs and RDs offer the same returns. While an RD is ideal for creating your emergency fund, an FD is ideal for holding it. During an urgent need, you can liquidate either. You will only lose a portion of your interest for the premature liquidation.
Don’t put all eggs in one basket
Diversity in savings and investment is necessary. It is advisable to park the bulk of your savings with large, stable banks and go for a carefully calibrated exposure when it comes to smaller banks.
Learn about sweep-in FD facility
Here, your bank automatically transfers surplus funds from your FD and never lets your bank balance go below the minimum level.
One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage. That’s all.
Don’t Do just FDs
Avoid making the mistake of investing only through FDs. This is because they yield low post-tax returns. Therefore, a 7 percent FD returns only 4.9 percent if your highest marginal income tax rate is 30 percent.
Kya Mutual Funds sach mein Sahi Hain?
Equity funds buy stocks in high-performing companies. Debt funds invest in the government and corporate bond markets. Liquid funds invest in money market instruments—highly liquid debt instruments, such as treasury bills issued by the Government of India.
While picking any MF, do look at its past performance, the fund manager’s credentials, and the quality of securities it is composed of. You may want to refer to its fund rating. Several MF research websites analyze funds on various parameters, such as performance, risks, and costs.
Laddering
Split the money into five deposits at different rates. Each deposit will renew at different intervals of one, two, three, four, and five years. Doing so ensures better average returns.
Highs and Lows
When the rates are high, go for longer tenures with your deposits. When they are low, ladder them and wait for higher returns.
Credit score
Your credit score is a measure of your ability to repay your past loans. A lower score—anything under 750—implies you have had trouble paying your loans on time.
FOMO-JOMO
Turn your FOMO into JOMO—the joy of missing out. You might save yourself from wasteful expenditure.
Using Corporate Insurance Wisely
You have the privilege of working for an employer that provides great health coverage, do not waste it. Port the policy when you leave that job, and continue with the coverage—it will help you protect your family because getting coverage for your parents only gets tougher with time.
When your policy is due for renewal, you have the option of shifting it to another insurance provider. This ensures you will not lose the waiting periods already served when the term for your new policy begins.
50-30-20
50 percent to be set aside for essential monthly expenses. These can be for rent, groceries, utilities, education costs, or insurance payments. Then, 30 percent can be spent at your discretion—visiting the mall, upgrading your gadgets, or taking a vacation. Lastly, the 20 percent should be set aside for savings and investments—the minimum amount of money you need to compulsorily lock away.
MoSCoW Method
It stands for Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have.
Eisenhower Matrix
If something is important, do it now. If it is urgent, but not important, delegate it. If something is not urgent but important, schedule it for later. If it is neither important nor urgent, avoid doing it.
Invest and Forget and let the Power of Compounding do its magic
Companies by Market Cap
India’s top 100 companies by market capitalization would be called large-cap. Mid-cap companies would now be those ranked from 101 to 250. And small-cap companies would be any company ranked 251 onwards.
To rephrase physicist Richard Feynman talking on quantum physics, if you think you understand taxation, you probably do not understand taxation.
