I am rich..

"I am rich". 

This is a rare or I must say an impossible to hear claim in Indian middle class society. Nobody ever feels that they are rich or maybe rich enough to admit it in their social circles. Contrary to my affinity towards non-material world of core values, here I am thinking more in terms of money and material possessions.

This thought struck me recently. I was reflecting upon a usual difference of opinion with my wife, on a petty matter that briefly entered the territory of family finances.

Who are the riches in our society? If I ask this to regular people in Indian middle class, answers might be Ambanis, Adanis, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Shah Rukh Khan, Birlas, Tatas, some politicians, cricketers, or some other famous personalities in public domain. If I probed further and asked if only these few people were rich, I may further get an answer that there may be many others who are not as popular as the ones cited earlier, like Lakshmi Mittal (ArcelorMittal), Bharti Mittal (Airtel), Mukesh Bansal (Flipkart/Cultfit), Deepinder Goyal (Zomato), Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), big bulls like Jhunjhuwalas, Radhakishan Damani (D-Mart) etc. And then there may be many who are not active in public domains.

I and many other people belonging to the middle-class might never make as much money as these riches. Does this mean that we can never call ourselves or maybe at least feel "rich", in plain terms of money? Does this mean that we should start calling ourselves "poor"? But if we are "poor", then what are our daily helps and hundreds of blue collar workers who we see around us? 

I think that we can safely say that we are neither rich nor poor. Most of us should belong to this "nobody" category. But then within our circle of nobodies, we often think that others have more money and more resources than us, which makes us feel "relatively" poor. This often leads to feelings of inferiority, and inexpressible (but having feelable vibes) emotions like envy, anxiety, insecurity, insufficiency, ill-fate, self-doubt etc. We see others, from our clan of sufficiency, post their seemingly "rich" experiences on social media. This makes us either feel compelled to try live similar "rich" experiences or feel sad about our "poor" selves. We seldom realize that we ourselves live "rich" or maybe even "richer". 

We don't realize it too often that we are "rich". Even if we realize this accidentally, we want to soon erase this thought from our memory. We feel insecure that holding this thought may either jinx our richness or may make us a careless spender. It may make us less committed to try and earn more money, and stay rich. 

In the vicious circle of external influences and personal insecurities, we stop realizing or cherishing the actual experiences of our rich lives. Whatsoever amount of money we may possess, our glass is always half-empty. If half a glass of water cannot quench my thirst, how will I even think about sharing a spoonful of this water with the ones whose glasses are empty or with the ones who don't even have any glasses to hold the water.

I am not a brilliant scholar who studied in IITs, IIMs, or Harvard, or Stanford. I am not blessed with great looks. I am not born in a family with great businesses or great wealth. I am not a great sportsperson. I have not been brilliant about maintaining a good body and good health. I am a simple Indian middle-class mediocre in all these aspects. With this mediocrity how can I expect from myself, or rather for myself, to be exceptionally wealthy like the riches whom I mentioned earlier.

If understood and capitalized well, mediocrity is a bliss. (Maybe I'll explore this "mediocrity" further, in more detail, in a later post). If accepted with grace, mediocrity helps us live a very happy, peaceful, and fuller life. If we acknowledge and respect our mediocrity, it can make us cherish our "richness" more often than ever. 

Like other aspects of my life, my career story has also been mediocre and does not have many star-moments. In fact, for a considerably long period of time, I've been earning very below-par salaries when compared to the market averages at different points in time of my IT career. In 2017, I took an approx. 25% cut in my salary. This was out of my insecurity of possibly losing my job because my employer had no projects left to put my technology skills to use. My then ongoing project was stalled suddenly because of USA's sudden policy tightening on IT outsourcing to India. For the next 5 months, I drew salary from my employer without contributing to its revenue. My employer was trying hard to cross-train me, along with others like me, into non-tech, services-only roles. The idea was to make us contribute to the company's relatively more stable revenue stream of services-only offerings to customers. The change of role and the related work stream seemed tough to my mediocre and ageing learner mind. At this time, my son was less than 1 year old. We lived in a humble 2.5 BHK on rent, in a not-so-rich looking neighborhood. Thoughts like "how I'll manage my household if I did not earn for a few months.." haunted me bad. The stress eventually led to a 2-months long fever which was not attributed to any viral infections or known flus. Out of extreme insecurity and desperation, I decided to switch to a safer employer who offered almost 100% job guarantee for my tech skills. In that moment, I just didn't care about the fact that I was switching to a much lower salary than what I used to get before.

The salary cut in 2017 had a cascading effect on my relative standings with respect to average salaries at my levels of IT skills and experience. In 2021, during a casual hangout, I asked one of my close neighbors - "What should be my ideal salary?". She was then a Director in a globally well-known IT firm. Surprised at the openness of my question, and with a lil hesitation, she told that my salary should be around 39 lacs. I told her that it was 26. 

The lady had a mixed expression of pity and wonder. She might have felt a lil envy as well, of the fact that I was still living a visibly "rich" life, maybe because of the grants/inheritance from my father. This lady lost her father quite early in her life, but she's blessed and rightfully proud to have a success story of being a self-made person. She has achieved great heights in both professional and social life, without any financial support and/or parental guidance along her way. Rightfully, she belonged to the clan of people who may not think very high of getting financial backings from family and then living a lavish rather than the otherwise affordable mediocre lifestyles. 

My father is a man of very strong core values and principles. I have written a bit more about his values and related life stories in one of my older posts When Dreams Come True... My father held on to his core while he moved from his revolutionary youth into the binding family life. He didn't abandon his resolve to serve the country by serving his immediate society or community. He retired from a central govt. financial institution that manages all govt. spends in agriculture and rural development sectors of our country's economy. He held on to his principles of honesty and sincerity, and maintained a clean conscience as he moved up to very powerful ranks in his job. Like my grandfather, he didn't accumulate as much wealth as he could by taking undue advantages of his positions at work. What he did accumulate was a great sense of managing personal finances, putting them to righteous use, and multiplying whatever he duly earned, in a very organic manner. His life examples can be used to showcase how, irrespective of how much we earn, we can satisfy our personal needs, aim for a realistic future, save sufficiently for the future, and then also contribute our money and resources for the betterment of our society. He exemplified that we always owe to our society and to our country at large. We do not need to be "crazy" rich to have this conscience.

Ever since I started earning, my father has been telling me to save as much as I can. He acknowledges that private sector jobs like mine do not have any job security, and any good pension guarantees like govt. jobs. In the starting few years, he even encouraged me to apply for suitable openings in his as well as other govt. institutions. In 2010, there were 3 open positions in his bank. More than 3 lac candidates applied, 10 made it to the final interview round after two screening tests. I made it to the last 10. I desperately wanted that my father willingly pulled a few strings to help me clear the final round. Just a day before the interview, I asked him, very hesitatingly, if he did speak to someone. He said no. He told that my merit had brought me to the final 10, I'd make it to the final 3 as well if my merit and destiny warranted. I could not clear the final round. Like I missed the IIT overall cut-off by 3 marks, back in 2005, after clearing the individual cut-offs in all subjects in the finals. I missed it like I missed admission to a reputed college of MBA, in 2009, when my turn to claim the admission was next to the last in the final round of counselling. But I still ended up becoming "rich" :), how?

In the following graph, I have mapped important parts of my financial journey over last approx. 10 years. While it's a simple graph which can be understood by normal folks, I'll mention and explain some key observations and inferences that can help visualize my journey of becoming rich. I've masked the numbers of the y-axis deliberately because of practical reasons and impractical insecurities :). The big 0 though marks the apt value at the intersection of both the axis.

Tracking Expenses

My father did not give me the keys to his vault of life savings. Though he had saved well for himself and his family, he did not encourage me to spend freely. Once I started earning, he never kept a close watch on my income and expenditures. He respected the idea of not interfering in children's lives when they started earning. He believed that earning children should be allowed to pave their own ways to walk the journey of life. It is easy to preach and gossip about this idea of non-interference, but its very difficult to execute, especially in an Indian middle-class family. My father did it. However, once in a while, and out of a genuine concern, he used to casually ask me about how much I'd saved so far. Knowing his discipline in keeping a track of his personal finances, I knew this question would pop up once in a while. I started maintaining a "Monthly Spends Analyzer" (MSA), to be able to answer such sudden one-off questions. 

Initially the MSA was a very simple table in an MS Excel worksheet. It had a few rows and few columns holding month-wise numbers for simple expenses like rent, phone bills, electricity bills, groceries, servants, food & entertainment, parlor, car maintenance etc. Slowly these simple expenses got clubbed under some major expense heads like "Common Expenses", "Personal Expenses", "Travel and Leisure" etc. Better heads like "Investments" and other savings instruments like "PPF", "FD", "Sovereign Gold Bonds" etc. got added. Over last 15 years, this MSA has evolved into a great tool that enables me to manage my finances very effectively. It is now full of complex formulas that can quickly calculate averages and statistics to give me a quick snapshot of my overall financials. The above graph is derived from the data captured in this MSA only.

My father didn't ask me to restrict my spends. He requested me to just track them, and review them on a monthly/quarterly/yearly basis. He taught me that this would give me a better understanding of where I was spending my hard-earned money, and would allow me to judge whether I liked it the way it was.

Following is a snapshot of a middle-aged version of my MSA:

Respecting Personal Discretional Expenses

As per the classification of various social castes in my community, I am a "baniya". Baniyas, as per prevailing social presumptions, are seen as miserly people who are very protective about their money. We are known to spend close to NIL on personal discretional wants or leisure. Our cultural DNA holds us back from spending on things that do not offer safety for the future or higher monetary returns. I've seen this behavior being more prominent in many "richer" people who belong to other castes. However, because of the ages-old social conditioning, people in my caste have to wear this unwanted crown of being the most money-minded and least "fun".

My father defied this societal cast, to some extent. He managed his money well to save and invest mindfully in promising financial instruments of future wealth creation. On discretionary spends and luxury, he didn't spend in a thoughtless "non-baniya" manner. But he didn't hold back from spending if he saw an intrinsic value in the spend. My house is graced with royal, and now rare and very expensive, Teakwood furniture which he bought for his house, more than 40 years back, when he belonged to the lower middle-class bracket of our society. Likewise, a lil, if not high, percentage of his income was spent on his and his family's wants and leisure. Maybe this semi-liberated mindset is a result of his conditioning from his upbringing. He grew in a debt-ridden family that had only one earning hand in his father. His mother was a housewife and his five elder other brothers were not all very brilliant to be financially well-settled. Unintentionally though, his mother must have taught him well on how to spend whatever we have on long-term values rather than short term cravings. I can make this out when he shares some of his childhood stories in which my grandmother is one of the lead actors.

When compared with my father and his generation, I was brought up in a much more blessed financial atmosphere. I guess this applies to majority of my social peers. I could not have done much about the rampant influence of then modern times, in my early adulthood. I had dreams of living life lavishly. In fact, while creating my profile on Orkut (one of the first social media platforms of my time), I asked one of my rich and modern day-scholar friends to recommend a fancy Orkut profile name. He searched in his adopted bank of modern and fashionable names, and recommended "Bon Vivant". I asked for the meaning, loved it, and adopted it as my first social media profile name. 

Watching my father live his entire life with austerity and careful accounting, and also respecting my cultural DNA, I told my young earning self to at least keep an account of my discretionary spends. It took me some time, and repeat efforts, to make my wife understand the idea to just log, not restrict, her discretionary spends. I respected the fact that my wife came from a different social caste and background. She belongs to one of the "Pakistani Punjabi" castes called "Multanis". People in her caste are better known for living life "king-size" - eating, wearing, and spending happily, even if they lived in a hut and not in a castle. Rightfully, she had a different money personality than mine. 

In Hindu marriages, we take an oath of understanding and adjustment towards our life companion. Respecting my oath, I worked out a money personality that was a mean of her and my individual personalities, for our better companionship. Following graph gives a sneak peak into this personality.

2014-15 was the honeymoon period of our companionship. There were many indulgences and thoughtless spendings in this period. It can be made out from the fact that Personal Expenses made for almost 50% of the total expenses. Towards the end of 2015, we reviewed our spending patterns to identify where we were spending and where we wanted to spend for a better life. We allocated portions of our monthly household incomes to various heads which, over the last 10 years, have evolved from many minor heads to few major, consolidated heads.

• Personal Expenses - my and my wife's pocket moneys. We can spend this on anything without having to explain or justify this expenditure. This includes shopping, parlor, spa, dine-outs, movies etc. We review and keep increasing our pocket moneys as per the dynamics of our household income as well as inflation. We have been able to maintain a consistent percentage of these expenses to satisfy the always craving child inside our individual selves.
  
  
• Travel & Family Leisure - Like a modern couple, we want to travel and create beautiful picture memories, both to look back and cherish later, and to tell happy stories and experiences in our social circles. So we allocate a mutually agreed portion to travel. Leisure includes celebrations like birthdays, anniversaries, festivities etc. Contrary to the visibly restrictive nature of this allocation, it liberates us and brings us more joy and freedom to spend on any and everything while enjoying, coz we know we've planned it well and these spends won't dent our budget. We've travelled and enjoyed vacations in Kashmir, Goa, Jaisalmer & Jodhpur, Mumbai, Shimla, Rishikesh, Sikkim, Kerala, Puducherry, Mysuru, Madikeri, Chikkamagaluru, Kodaikanal, Ooty, and many weekend destinations around the places where we've lived.
  
  Influencers and buzzers keep poking that we've never gone International or never celebrated in some fancy ways. I am convinced that we didn't have any less fun than what we'd have had in these influenced ventures. I'll go on an international trip when the want comes to me intrinsically, organically. At times, my wife falls prey to these influences. Then I tell her that she can go if she really craves to go, but I won't be able to come along and enjoy until the call was organic. Anyways, budget for our solo or family travel ventures is already sorted and not a thing to worry about :).
  
  
• Common Expenses - These include essentials like rents & society dues; electricity, gas, phone, and other utility bills; vehicles' maintenance & fuel; insurance premiums; healthcare & hospitalization; income tax, property tax and other govt. dues; groceries; salaries of house helps; home repairs & decor etc. Like my father, I have a taste of getting quality woodwork done in my house. We've spent nicely on big woodworks in 4 out of our last 10 years of being together. Along with these essentials, common expenses also include following spends which can be considered personal but I considere them essential for the family, at large:
  
  
• Health Hygiene - We've spent thoughtfully on bettering our health by subscribing to various fitness programs like Cult, Curated Diets, Gym, Naturopathy etc. The results may not have been that great, but we cherish the fact that we consistently try.
  
  
• Professional Development - We've spent consciously on learning and gaining more knowledge. While I've spent majorly on books and newspapers, my wife has done multiple professional courses to add longevity to her dental practice. Also, as Modern Parents, we've not held back from spending on and trying various add-on courses for our now eight years old son. At a late stage in my life, I considered this to also include the consolidated loss that I booked while trading in Indian stock markets for around 6 years, before arriving at a trading strategy that has helped me earn consistently via investing in the markets. 

As evident in the graph, nature of our spendings have stabilized and harmonized over a period of time. This has helped us a lot in keeping our finances stable while fulfilling our wants and desires (both individual and those for family). Feelings of personal dissatisfaction and deprivation have been put at bay, at large.

30% Savings Rule and Equity Investing

Quite early in my earning career, my father told me, and reinforced time and again, that we must save at least 30% of our in-hand salary. In the initial few years, the salary was so less that 30% of it was nothing worth tracking. I lived far from home. A major chunk of my salary went in rents, travels for homecoming, and on my budding love life. I got married in 2014. A little maturity and futuristic approach started kicking in post 2015, when the honeymoon period ended. 

Following is the graph of my Investments vs Salary. My investments majorly comprised of my monthly savings, with some portion made up by the rent that I collected for my sister's flat in Pune that I managed. I invested my sister's lil earnings and tracked the returns to repay the principal plus the profit.

It can be seen that I was able to follow the 30% rule only in my "Grihasta Jeevan" (married life) which started in 2014. This was after almost 7 years of my father's repeat requests to try to follow the rule. 

Initially, my focus was more on putting my savings into PPF, VPF and other such fixed return instruments. From 2016, just after my son was born, I started investing in Indian stock markets via mutual funds. I started with a mutual fund SIP to save for my son in a disciplined manner. As I started tracking markets, I slowly got into equity trading.

2022 was an important point in my investments journey. After 6 years of diligent investing, and after making some huge losses on the way, I had finally arrived at a trading strategy that gave me the confidence to be able to earn from the markets, in a consistent manner. Also there was a non-usual cash flow from my parents to me, as they'd sold their 30 years old house in our natives. With these two factors I invested a big amount into the stock market. 

2018-20 was the darkest phase in my journey of stock market investing. After making lil profits in simple cash-and-carry trading in 2016 and 2017, I started thinking of myself as the "God" of trading. I ventured into the high-risk high-reward Futures & Options (F&O) trading. I lost close to 20 lacs in the next two years. A part of my desperation and stupidity of sticking to F&P trading was driven by my ego that told me to try and compensate for my 2017 salary cut with the possible high rewards from this risky adventure. It turned out to be a misadventure. Though it incurred a huge monetary loss upon me, the experience had a big positive impact in shaping my current money personality. I may write about this experience in a later post. With time and perseverance, I was able to cash in on my learnings and recover all of my previous losses in the years 2023 and 2024. This journey continues, now on a stable and happy path, without any further misadventures.

Avoid Borrowing from Unrelated Entities

Like his other simple but great lessons in personal finance, my father taught me to avoid institutional loans as much as I could. He ensured that I have not taken a single penny of loan, and have not paid a single penny of interest, so far in my life.

Until a few years back, like many of my peers, I was possessed by the self-elating idea that "I will be a self-made man. I will not take or ask for a single penny from my parents. I will build all my assets myself..". I don't remember under what influence I picked this idea and then got stuck to it. I never cared to review or validate it. Whenever my father spent any money on me, I used to make a note thinking I'd repay soon, like an informal loan. Maybe early years of adulthood and filmy dreams shaped the way I imagined myself as a matured, well-earning, well-settled, and an enviable IT corporate. Only recently, I started relieving myself of the burdens of these unwarranted and unthought expectations. In fact, now I find this expectation lacking rationale, at least for the majority of "mediocre" adults like me. 

I can't understand why we are happy to borrow from a bank or an unrelated and profit-centric financial institution, at extremely high interest rates, when our own parents have the money to help us. Why do we opt in to pay EMIs that settle the interest first and then the principal, over many years, when we can simply borrow (if not take) the required money from our parents. Why do we opt for paying almost 50-100% of our principal as interest? Are we not trying to satisfy our false ego by doing this? Which fellow social idiot will worship us for winning this loan vs parental help battle? 

Formal loan is understandable if our parents or close ones do not have the required financial resources to help, or if our relationship with parents is strained. But this is not the case for majority of the workforce that graduated in or after the year 2000. I don't understand why we need to wait for our parents to die before we acquire all of their unutilized financial assets and then, not knowing completely what to do with those assets, use them partially or completely to repay our debts. And then keep hoping that our respects for the help reaches them through our occasional remembrances of them. Why can't we let them help us and repay their interest by giving them our time, attention, care, and respect, if and when they seek it in their lesser active or elderly years. It's easier than living with the clout of debts.

My father wanted me to have an intent to be financially independent. He encouraged me to save and afford my own long-term assets and big expenses. But whenever I needed a loan, which I could plan and repay from my income, he intervened to save me from the institutions and their vicious circles of EMIs. Over the last 10-15 years, without factoring in the minor exchanges that ought not be counted within a family, he's given me an approx. 1.4 crore rupees. Major chunk of this amount went into buying my house in 2018. This was followed by my rare but expensive indulgence of buying a Tata Safari SUV car in 2022. The remaining amounts I've invested in the stock market, with my refined trading strategy. 

Whenever I try to repay or make any big expenditures for him, he says he has enough and asks me to better save the amount and manage it sensibly for my future. I know my peers who've literally "richer" fathers but they still have long running loans, with amounts running into 80-90 lacs or even more than 1cr.

The orange line in the first graph shows how he always stood behind me, to save me from being pushed into the trap of debt and external borrowings.

Giving Back to the Society

It's not only me who my father saved from the debt trap. He's given equal, or maybe more amounts, to build individually owned assets for my mother and my sister as well. He's also given substantial amounts of money to help his nephews and nieces close long standing loans and stabilize their financially troubled lives. Also, he exchanged interest-free loans with his close colleagues and friends, to help and save each other from taking institutional loans. Looking at him, his younger colleagues realized how living debt free had a positive compounding effect on one's financial health.

My father's sense of commitment to the nation is captured in my earlier post When Dreams Come True... Additionally, when he got retired in 2018 and moved to our 20+ years old house in our natives, he volunteered to redesign and beautify a big park that was at the centre of our neighbourhood. He had seen beautiful parks while he lived and worked in Chandigarh. With his knowledge in agriculture and farming techniques, he started rebuilding the park. People were startled to see this retired officer-class person doing a labourer's work himself. They were further surprised to see him spending his personal money on upkeeping a community park. Some of the neighbours approached him to ask, and got inspired by him. They were living there for years, had at least 2-3 times more money and assets than my father, but the idea of spending a lil for the betterment of equally well-to-do neighbourhood never struck them. Some of them had aligned themselves with some voluntary social causes, like giving blankets and clothes etc. to poor, but nothing of this kind had ever struck them. Soon the park became a community movement. It blossomed and became so beautiful that local politicians approached the community to claim the credit for the nearby elections. Within two years of my father's moving in, the park became a model for community-living. It soon became a talk of the town. The prices of property in our neighbourhood appreciated by more than 40%, they surpassed the rates in other neighbourhoods by a good margin. In 2022 when my father left our natives and moved to Bangalore. While leaving our natives, he received a grand and emotional farewell from many senior and "rich" members of the community.

I've tried to follow my father's footsteps.

• During my younger earning years, I started with bringing together my big extended families of 5 paternal uncles. Not all of my paternal uncles and their families were "rich" like us. And most of them remained aloof, out of routine busy natures of individual lives and the impractical insecurities. My father always wanted to bring his and his brothers' next generations together. But when he used to float the idea of get togethers in the family, individual egos clashed on pity matters like - how to aptly invite respective son-in-laws from every brother's family; how and what to gift the son-in-laws and daughters to offer respects as per the traditional "baniya" culture; how to split the expenses; etc. These things used to spoil the whole spirit, killing the whole idea.
  
  Sensing my father's long standing social want, I started celebrating my grandfather's birthday every year. I did this with the disclaimer that all expenses would be borne by me. Obviously, my father jumped in and bore all expenses himself, but he was very happy with my intent. He had now found an emotional support to overcome the evil egos within his family. My father and I  used to invite my entire extended family in the celebrations. Everyone felt so warm and nice to come together and celebrate like one big family. There were some "baniya" ego-clashes but they seemed small and got washed away with the bigger joy and happiness. In one of the post celebrations exchanges of pleasantries, my cousin sister complimented me with the remark "Like father like son..". I cherish that as a fulfilling reward for my efforts.
  
  The celebrations stopped in 2016, when I moved to Bangalore. But even now, some or the other family members keep remembering those happy times. Sometimes they share their feelings of missing the togetherness of those celebrations.
  
  
• After 2 years of settling down in Bangalore, and after having assessed my long term career and life prospects, I decided to buy my own house in the city. This was towards the end of the year 2018. I planned for a bank loan but, like I mentioned earlier, my father intervened and sponsored majority of the purchase. My apartment has 101 flats. At the time of my purchase, it was around 12 years old with most of the flats occupied by their first or second owners. It took me around 2 years to settle in the apartment and understand the social atmosphere there. I was surprised that there was not much sense of community-living in my apartment. Undeclared small social groups existed, mostly based on north-south cultural divides or out of unresolved past differences of opinions among.
  
  In 2020, driven by my inherited drive to serve the community, I joined the Management Committee of the Resident Welfare Association (RWA) of my apartment, as a non-executive member. I wanted to understand the polity that was driving the community, so I did not hold any of the executive posts in the committee. After joining the committee, first project that came to the team was that of painting the entire apartment. The executive members discussed and assessed the estimate expenditure to be around 65 lacs. This looked absurd to me. I challenged the estimate and opted to be a part of a sub-committee that was then formulated for the task. Working alongside 2 other members, I brought the quote of around 35 lacs and got the project started. This gave me an initial sense of the lack of competence, intent, or financial prudence in the executive members of the committee. The painting got completed in 2 years with a net cost of around 36 lacs. 
  
  Over the course of a few months after joining the committee, I became aware of the fact that the financials of my apartment had not been audited by an independent auditor, for the past many years. Also there were abstract spendings that did not reflect in the general upkeep of our apartment estate. But then, towards the end of 2020, Covid-19 struck the entire world.
  
  Like almost everyone in the world, my community also did not have any clue about how to handle the situation. I was also scared and confused, personally. I acknowledged my ignorance and fear of death. I contemplated and thought that the best I could do is individual precaution and then trust the country's govt. and civic authorities in terms of following the guidelines that were issued to the general public. I understood the policymakers' intent of issuing "guidelines" and not the restricting "rules" or "laws". They respected the fact that an individual's dignity, integrity and personal circumstances could not be remote-controlled by "constraining" orders and rules. This in a situation when the policymakers themselves had an almost zero understanding of the situation at hand.
  
  While people were already stressed and doing their best to their individual capacities and understandings, the executive committee members of our apartment RWA started formulating and imposing abstract rules on residents' individual conducts. This added to the stress of already helpless and locked-down residents. When I challenged the rationale of these rules, I was voted out by another abstractly designed voting mechanism, which was claimed to be "democratic". I validated my counter-points with few other residents and then voiced them in the community discussion forums. However, the members who strongly agreed with me in personal one-to-one conversations remained silent on the discussion forums. They did so partly because of the fear that the debate would expose them to the judgement of an otherwise indifferent community, and add to their existing stress. Their silence made my concerns to be interpreted as minor disagreements of a few in a bigger social scheme of things. The others who were paranoid with their own fears, and some intellectuals who were missing daily soaps in their self-imposed confinements, sided with the committee and justified imposing it's restraining rules over the residents. They didn't bother challenging the rules coz they applied to only those "idiots" who dared to step out of their flats or the apartment. I continued to push my opinion that having all other daily, physical, public works at hold, the committee should focus on doing the important online tasks like completing the pending audits and completing other statutory and regulatory compliances for the apartment. On this again, the silents remained silent and the paranoids did not pay any heed.
  
  To handle the Covid situation, I proposed that we collected relevant data like age, blood groups etc. of our residents so that required support could be provided to affected members. I proposed collecting data via Google Forms and try coordinating with healthcare providers to organize Vaccination camps in our apartment. But all this was killed as a mutiny of a member who was frustrated with the executives. Without any support from committee, I pursued my plan to collect data. Initially only about 30% of the flats submitted the data. These majorly included the silents. I kept publishing the stats around the data collected, which led to a gradual increase in the numbers. In parallel, I started approaching hospitals in the vicinity to help organize vaccination camps, as and when the vaccines would be ready. Looking at the low numbers from my apartment, I collaborated with similar-sized neighbourhood apartments to generate numbers that could get the attention of the healthcare providers to draw them towards our community. Finally, out of this collaboration, I got to know that there was a vaccination camp in a nearby apartment which was 5 times the size of our smaller apartments. I reached out to the RWA committee of that apartment and got the permission to send my community members for vaccination. I published the received permission to my community and got around 10-15% of my apartment residents vaccinated. This was followed by another vaccination camp in which I got another 15% members of my community vaccinated, along with all blue collar staff that worked in our apartment.
  
  I felt very happy and proud to be able to help my community, during a grave and never-seen-before crisis. My community started seeing sense in my approach. Having proven myself true to my words, I again pushed my apartment committee to enlighten the community on the state of our RWA's finances. Finally, after my repeat persuasions, they called for a virtual Annual General Meeting (AGM) in June 2021. Once again they presented an unaudited balance sheet, and finally quit the committee. Elections for the new committee happened and I was elected as the President of our RWA.
  
  One month into taking the office, my new committee realized that the numbers presented in the AGM were not true to reality. We realized that we had only enough funds to pay our apartment's utility bills for 2 months, after which we'd go bankrupt.
  
  What followed was a revolutionary journey, both for my apartment and for my personal self. I hope I will cover this entire journey in a later post, but following are a very few of the many never-expected things that happened to my community in the next 3 years of my Presidentship.
  
  
• All owners of 101 flats of my apartment contributed more than 40000/- per flat, to bail our apartment out of bankruptcy. This was on top of the regular maintenance of around 60000/- that they paid annually. 
  
  
• Even though my team started with almost zero money at hand we were able to do major repairs and improvements to the infrastructure. This includes
• Refurbishing 5 out of 6 lifts.
• Replacing swimming pool tiles and pump motors.
• Upgrading STP with modern and latest specification machinery.
• Fixing dysfunctional fire fighting systems via a major overhaul and getting Fire Safety clearance from civic authorities.
• Fixing and servicing apartment generators.
• Replenishing Kids' Play Area sand with superfine and natural sea sand, rather than cheaper and now prominently used machine sand which is not good for kids.
• Upgrading CCTV systems to latest standards, increasing coverage from 30% to more than 80%, approximately.
• Building long pending front compound wall of the estate.
• Fixing dysfunctional amenities like Steam, Sauna, and Snooker.
  
• Installing safety nets in lobbies of all blocks.
  
  

• Even with the major repairs that demanded major expenses, we generated a cash reserve of approx. 30 lacs, from the starting zero. This was done by
• My team's experience and innovative ideas to execute civil works.
• Recovering long pending dues from seasoned defaulters.
• Streamlining dues collections and flat-wise reconciliations.
• Converting 80K subscription fee for a community management software to 1 lac guaranteed ad revenue.
• Engaging digital ad vendor to install digital ad screens and get monthly rents.
• Reviewing contract and increasing rent for a telecom vendor's tower infrastructure hosted in our apartment premises.
• Cleaning and maintaining guest rooms like never before, making them more attractive for residents to pay and book for their guests.
  
  
• Parking slots allocated to all 101 flats were diligently reviewed and reallocated. Confusions regarding parking allocations had caused major stresses to both residents as well as non-residing owner members of the RWA. Cycle stands were installed in available free spaces in the parking area, for cleaner and clutter free parking of bicycles.
  
  
• In 2022, during the 3rd wave of Covid-19, 40+ flats were provided focused and personalized care by the RWA. Instead of paranoia about personal safety, there was a fresh sense of helping our impacted neighbours by offering food and essentials during their confinement. I collaborated with BBMP to conduct Covid-19 RT-PCR tests for all residents, at our apartment premises itself.
  
  
• National festivals - Independence Day and Republic Day were celebrated every year at a scale that only grew bigger and better every year. Cultural festivals like Ganesha Chaturthi, Diwali, Holi, Krishna Janmashtami, Hanuman Jayanti, Shri Ram Mandir Pran Pratishtha were celebrated with joy and energy that were experienced never before in the community. Nobody in our community ever thought that we'd organize DJ nights in our apartment premises, not once but twice, with even seniors grooving to the beats on the dance floor.
  
  
• Trying to create a platform for everyone to just walk in and gel within the community, I started a simple initiative of serving Tea and Biscuits every Tue and Fri afternoon, at the beautifully landscaped first floor common area of our apartment. Much beyond my imagination, the tea acted like a catalyst that amalgamated feelings of care, childish naughtiness of seniors, fun of kitty parties' and picnics, joys of celebrating golden and diamond jubilees, and humane connections into an infallible sense of staying together like one big family.

My journey as the community's President has been very eventful and rewarding. It had its due share of pain alongside the rewards. Maybe I'll capture all highlights of this journey in a later post. But, with the above key highlights, I am quite satisfied that I have been able to give back to my society, a bit if not too much.

• Beyond my extended family and apartment community, I have been able to extend help to more people in my circles of influence.
  
  
• I have given approx. 19 lacs of interest free loans to my and my wife's colleagues, to save them from the institutional debt traps. Some of these were for contractual civil works that were related to noble social causes.
  
  
• I recommended my carpenter to friends and relatives, and got him work orders worth approx. 35 lacs.
  
  
• In certain dire needs and critical circumstances of life, I was able to raise crowdfunds of more than 1 lacs for my apartment's staff. This happened on more than one occasions. In both the instances, I was happily surprised that people honoured my requests, maybe because of the relationship of trust and care that I was able to build with all of them. 
  
  
• I share newspaper articles on personal finance management with a big group of people. These articles are easy to read, understand and relate, and are extremely helpful in getting one started on a journey towards better financial health. Along with these articles, I share my experience of investing and my regular trades in Indian Stock Markets. So far, I have helped my peers earn an approx. 3 lacs, if I go by what they tell me when I casually ask them on how much money they've been able to make from my tips and advice. 
  
  

What Next, if I am already rich?

Like many achievers say, reaching the top is one thing, staying at the top is another. Though I should not call myself an achiever in the money space, I do acknowledge that I need to at least stay wherever I am in this space. 

Recently I watched an interview of an Indian ace investor Mr. Ramesh Damani. When the host asked him "How much money do you think is enough?", his answer was as subjective as was the objectivity of the question. He told that we need to understand that money gives us the power to express ourselves. We need money to do what we want to do, be it taking a two-year sabbatical to just relax and do nothing, traveling the world, charity, philanthropy, or whatever. As long as one is able to make enough money to express oneself, one should be good.

Having written this account of my "richness", I feel that I am able to express myself sufficiently, if not completely. I am happy with my current levels of expressions. I don't mind expressing more if it comes organically. I can easily travel with my "richer" friends who earn at least twice of my salary, who've better family assets than me, and who put lesser thoughts in spending on luxuries and wants. Thanks to efficient budgeting, I can afford to match my friends' lavish spends, occasionally though. However, I cannot afford to spend on sudden wants that generally arise out of external influences or disturbed emotions. This one unaffordability sometimes leads to "baniya" vs "multani" battles. Thankfully, the peace agreements are signed soon, and wars are avoided more often than not.

I find a lot of correlation in what my father has taught me through life and what I read these days in the articles on personal finance. Like one of the recent articles reiterated Warren Buffet's advice for youngsters - "Don't save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving...". I could relate this to the 30% savings rule that my father has taught me. Another article mentioned - "Formulating a budget is your first step. Start by listing all your expenses in a month, which will tell you where the money is going. Identify the unnecessary expenses that can be curtailed...". Many articles talk about the principles of compounding in long-term investing. One of the keys to reap full benefits of compounding is to start saving early, my father guided me well to do this. 

While writing this end, I suddenly remembered the book "Rich Dad Poor Dad", written by Robert T. Kiyosaki. I read this book many years back. It feels strange that I can relate to the book now, so many years after I read it. 

I think that even if I am not "rich" in terms of the amount of money I have, I do to have a "Rich Dad", and I ought to be one to my son.. 

My "modern" parenting..

Just a few days back, I read an article about how modern parenting is getting harder with every passing day. The following section of the article felt like a tight slap of reality check to the confused, cluelessly running around parents like me.

"... Today's parents not only have to rock their career and raise their children, they also have to make sure that their bub eats avocado, scores well, excels in a sport, and knows how to speak at least one foreign language. To top this, parents have to monitor screen-time, keep theirs kids safe online, and work on their emotional growth without losing their own temper as "gentle parenting" is the trend du jour. The stress is not caused by the child or the parent. The stress is caused by the reality not meeting expectations."

My first reaction after reading this section was a big laugh, at myself and at my clan of fellow modern parents. My son is just about to turn 8 now. He did his kindergarten in a very good corporate-brand pre-school. Post preschool, for his primary education, we researched a lot only to enrol him into the branded International Board (IB) accredited school in which most of the kids of our apartment had enrolled. The choice of the pre-school was simpler and easier. The pre-school had a tie-up with my Employer, so we had to pay a nominal fee for a highly-rated, expensive, and a thoughtfully crafted curriculum. Also, the pre-school's corporate branch was located inside my workplace campus, so we were reassured of regular checks and immediate attendance to our little bundle of joy whenever he needed us. Logic vs influence debate on our choice of the primary school has been avoided for the good. The reasons for this avoidance may become implicit, maybe by the end of this post.

Apart from the high-rated schooling, my son is blessed (both parentally and financially) to have already enrolled for and having tried to learn following additional skills. We, his modern parents, believed that these would help him achieve more and faster in life:

• Tuition for writing alphabets and numbers, at the age of about 3 yrs.
• Judo, at 4 yrs.
• Art & craft, also at 4 yrs.
• Swimming classes, twice at the ages of 5 & 7 yrs.
• Dance classes, at the age of around 6 yrs.
• Badminton classes, at 7 yrs.
• Public speaking, online, also at 7 yrs.
• Cursive writing, at 7 yrs.

If I remember correctly, the main reason for the alphabets and numbers tuition was its simple proximity. The tutor lady lived almost next door and was popular for having taught little additional things to a lot of kids in our community. For Judo classes, "modern" parents invited a professional trainer to conduct the classes in our apartment itself. Art & craft and the first swimming classes were to pass time relatively more productively during the long summer holidays. Then, as he crossed the age of 5, we started thinking that he could learn faster owing to his naturally grown-up and improved acumen to follow instructions and grasp things. So we enrolled him at professional training academies for Dance, Swimming, and Badminton, not all together but spread across the calendar year. In between we also realized that he had started speaking very less as compared to his earlier times. Our parental fear was confirmed in one of his Parents Teachers Meeting at school when his teacher told us that he remained quite and was not as active and mischievous as other kids in his class. So we enrolled him into an online public speaking course, in which the trainer used to "simply talk" to our kid, along with other 5-6 kids. Then we developed a fear that though our son writes beautifully in the broken letters form, he might struggle in his exams as we believed that cursive handwriting is faster. We noticed that almost all other kids of his class wrote in cursive form. So we enrolled him into a weekly-twice cursive handwriting class conducted by one of his school's teachers, during post-school hours. 

In addition to the above, there have been discussions and trials for Classical Music vocals training, and a piano class. This because we discovered that he's got a natural good voice, he's good at casual singing, and he picked up very fast when I taught 2-3 songs to him via beginner-level piano lessons available on YouTube. Also there have been passing talks amongst the modern parents to enrol our kids to some Bhartiya Sanskriti School, an informal school in a neighbouring apartment that taught kids about the rich Indian culture and history.

I feel fortunate that I got slapped by this recent article. I am lucky that I woke up (hopefully) to see my reality. My son has given me hundreds of reasons to feel happy in the journey of my parenthood, which is still ongoing. There are many moments that I'll cherish throughout my life, and I know there are many more to come. However, when I look back at the aforementioned aspect of my parenting journey, I see the need of some course correction. Not to say that all of the above mentioned attempts were bad or non-productive, some of them actually helped. Our minds must have had many justifiable reasons at the times when we made these choices.

The most common thought behind all these classes was like - "...how will we identify his natural talent to nurture, without exploring, by letting him experience different things...". And of course, we belong to the aware, open-minded, financially stable and thus the fortunate middle-class which can afford the any costs for these explorations, especially for our child. 

Taking a cue from the article and looking back at this parental expedition of ours, I feel that our reasons could have held more weight if we were not fretting over some of the basics aspects of our son's development over all these years. He's eight and still struggling to develop a taste, respect, and an acceptable way of eating his regular meals. My wife and I have our roots in Haryana and Punjab, the biggest agricultural states of India having legacies of healthy and rich cuisines. Both of us look naturally "overnutritioned", our son looks otherwise. As mentioned in the article, both of us also have the responsibility of "rocking" our careers and professions, to sustain our "modern" societal tags - "financially stable", "open-minded", "aware" etc. Tired of our failed attempts in his nutritional wellbeing, we have already been giving some popular, well marketed, paediatricians' recommended, elite because expensive, powder based supplements to our son, so that he does not look weak. We do not stop our son from eating deep-fried, processed, made from days-old frozen meat (or sourced from not-so-hygienically-verified sources), non-veg food when he's craving for that just because one of his friends who have shallow influences on him has been eating the same at one of our social outings. Here, our reason is our insecurity that eating non-veg might help him become stronger in future. We ignore the sense that "healthy" non-veg is far beyond the general reach of our food's supply chain and it might never find a place in our kitchen. Also, we fear being judged by the influencing friends' parents that though I'm an eggetarian and my wife a passive non-vegetarian, we want to stop our son from eating non-veg and not let him "explore" his tastes. On the possibility of adulteration, they argue that the lifecycles and supply chain of vegetarian food are also quite adulterated these days. We do all this but we are not able to add the simple carrot, cucumber, sprouts etc. fresh cut roughage to his daily diet. He cries at the thought of it when we talk about it, and we immediately give up on the thought and maintain the status quo.

With all this, he's catching viral fever almost every 45-60 days on an average, for the last 3 years or so if I remember correctly. Here also we bring in a mix of our superficial awareness and "modern" hearsay. The "modern" parents discuss among themselves - "... this flu, which rotates among the family members, is a norm these days...", "... they catch it mostly from other kids in the school...", "...don't medicate him at the beginning, let the body fight naturally and develop immunity...". We let his body fight naturally for 3-5 days and then end up giving him even stronger antibiotics than what he'd have taken at the start of the infection. We defer the visit to the doc until we fail to prove the usefulness of our quackery, one more time. And then when the medicines prescribed by the doc bring some improvements within a couple of days, our egoist quack stops the medication as per our will and adopted wisdom. Then a fellow parent tells us about the "harmless" homeopathic medicine. Of course, we can afford that as well and there are no possible side-effects.

I learnt from a not-so-popular web show that I watched recently. The main protagonist in the show makes a beautiful statement - "... aksar jab hum galti kar rahe hote hain, tab humein pata nahi hota ki hum galti kar rahe hain..." . (When we are committing a mistake we often do not know that we are committing a mistake).

More than 10 years back, I wrote Take a pause.... Maybe the newspaper article gave me another much needed pause, this time in my parenting journey.

When Dreams Come True...

The date was 22nd Jan 2024. The entire nation was immersed in the festive celebrations of Shri Ram Mandir Pran-Pratishtha (consecration) that was being conducted at the newly reconstructed Ram Mandir in the city of Ayodhya. To the Hindus of India, the city of Ayodhya is believed to be the birthplace of Shri Ram. The Pran-Pratishtha meant that the divine energy which they identified as "Ram Lalla" was being established within the idol that was placed in the Garbhagriha (inner sanctum) of the temple.

For most of us Indians, this was just another buzzing event that picked up the public craze as it neared its planned date of execution. Feelings, sentiments, and emotions of our people were diverse. Intellectual opinions and commentaries were complex, and thus confused their subscribers. In this post, I want to talk about my experience of this event in my social and inner domains.

My current social domain consists of active professionals, senior citizens, and my apartment kids with whom I often relive parts of my childhood by playing some simple outdoor games. Most of the active professionals work in IT services and dependent industries. They have a very strong belief that they belong to the modern, open-minded, well-informed culture of today's world. A common cliché that can be often heard in our discussions is - "I am more spiritual than religious". My regular conversations with them are mostly confined to very limited perspectives on mundane social and political developments that happen in the world surrounding us, a world which is more virtual than real. Interestingly, both the news and the perspectives in these conversations are adopted from the same source - social media. Any deviations from the status quo, or deeper dives into the topics, generally lead to the mood turning sour or boring. We also talk about our achievements at work, with the added flavours of politics and work ethics. These achievements hold no relevance in the real worlds, in fact they hold little relevance even at our workplaces. Interestingly, we all aware of this fact, but still we tend to talk about these mainly because we don't have any other marketable mettle to make any impact in the real world around us. 

The senior citizens group, on the contrary, is a diverse group with a vast domain of knowledge and interesting life experiences. Many senior citizens are retired from govt. institutions like nationalized banks and public departments, some are retired after serving in armed forces and related institutions, and some are retired from public-facing private institutions like private banks and schools. Some seniors worked at big manufacturing companies like TATAs that led the industrial revolution in our country. One of them worked at and still continues to hold honorary responsibilities in the IT mammoth IBM that led the IT revolution across the world. One of the seniors digitalised Indian Banking System, while another implemented Advance Reporting System in Indian Aviation Sector which transformed the entire industry. One of the revered seniors retired as the Director of Aeronautical Development Agency, after having been honoured by the Missile Man of India Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, while another retired from Senior Administrative post in Indian Railways having designed an important flyover over a railway track near my current apartment. These seniors have lived and experienced the journey of our country. They have contributed to our country's shift from a recently-freed-of-slavery, socially backward, under-developed, an unnoticeable third-world economy to being the fastest growing economy and one of the most impactful countries of the current world. My every interaction with these seniors enlightens me with more knowledge of how our great country and its culture has survived the tests of time. It survived via the rich and deep characters that our previous generations used to nourish and pass on to their next ones. I also realize that my generation is fast losing its inherited wealth of character and becoming a flock of dumb, confused, and remote-controlled sheep that can be pushed in any direction by a silent whip from some never-to-be-known social media shepherds.

In general, many of us active professionals have demanding work commitments at the start of every calendar year. This is because our employers are majorly based out of US and UK, and they return to work from their long Christmas and New Year breaks. They have a huge backlog of planned deliverables to be released in the first quarter of the calendar year. I was leading a project that was planned to be released on 23rd Jan 2024. I was trying very hard to release it a week before, to buy a little more than the nominal contingency that I had in the project from its inception. While many professionals were busy like me, many were indifferent to the 22nd Jan Shri Ram Pran Pratishtha event owing to their self-acclaimed futuristic modern-world viewpoints. Also, many were confused as to whether they should be religiously happy or scholastically secular by calling the event a politically-driven extravaganza which overshadowed the faith of the supposed-to-be-secular and ever-ready-to-be-oppressed Hindus. I guess many of us may still be confused. But now we don't need to think about it, as the event and the associated buzz have become a thing of the past.

In my social circle of senior citizens, there is one man who has been closely related to the history of this Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. I am lucky that I could get from him the following account of the long history of this temple and the associated faith & emotions of the Hindu Samaj. The story of the temple and this senior citizen's part in it go as follows.

Foreign-ruled and oppressed Hindu Samaj was waiting for the arrival of  Lord Shri Ram in Ram Mandir for more than 500 years. In 1949, Shri Ram gave his first Darshan (signs of presence) at a site that was inside a dome-shaped building constructed by the people belonging to a minority religion in India. This site was then believed to be the Garbhagriha of a historical Ram Mandir. Shri Ram's first Darshan marked the beginning of one of the longest Hindu Samaj campaigns. The campaign was to acknowledge that, historically, the site belonged to a Ram Mandir. To respect the faith of the people belonging to the oldest existing culture of the world, there was a call to reconstruct and restore the Mandir at that very site. There was a request to raze other structures that were constructed by razing the historical Ram Mandir, at that site. One of the biggest Indian architect of that time, Chandrakant Sompura, made the architectural design for restoring the temple. The present Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, constructed in 2023-24, is built on the foundations of the same design that was created in the 1949.

This senior citizen was born in 1958. He was the youngest in a big family of six very closely-knit brothers and his parents. As he grew up, he developed this rare sense of serving his country by serving the people around him. Maybe he inherited this sense of service from his parents. Even with a monthly income of INR100 and 6 children to bring up, his parents opted to take care of the schooling and upbringing of his two cousins. This in addition to the time that his father would spend in preparing writing-slates and then also teaching his cousins on them, almost every day after his regular work hours. His father would buy both jaggery and refined sugar, his mother would smartly put jaggery in the tea for the family members and sugar in the tea for the guests. His mother had not completed any formal education and did not hold any degrees, but she was "empowered" enough to own and manage the 100 rupees of the monthly household income to bring up a family of ten. One of the elder brothers of this man developed a revolutionary thought process. This was very unconventional to the business community to which the family belonged. Maybe with some influence from his elder brother, he got aligned with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in his active youth. He rebelled against the unfortunate Emergency that was applied in our country in 1975, by then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Taking a leaf out of Gandhiji's book of non-violent methods to revolt against anti-people authorities, RSS staged a "Jain Bharo Andolan" in which its protesting Karyakartas (workers) voluntarily let themselves be arrested, to fill the jails of the authority. So, at the age of 17, while he was still in school, he committed himself to the cause that he'd chosen to stand for, without bothering about its practical impact and repercussions of the same on his education, career, and thus on the rest of his life. He remained imprisoned in a Jail in Rohtak (a small city in the state of Haryana) for more than three months. Only his revolutionary elder brother made a few occasional visits to him, as they did not want their family to be identified publicly and be at the receiving end of the authorities. Also they wanted to avoid the ire of the popular self-oriented thinking of society over their family.

In 1983-84, while filling the entrance form to apply for a Govt. job, he was strongly advised to hide the fact that he had been jailed for a considerable amount of time. But his principles did not allow him to do that. His job application was rejected. But then the destiny led to a reorganization of the Govt. department. The scheme of things rewarded his strongly-held principles and led to his appointment to a new sub-department which hired the candidates who had the scholastic merit but were still rejected for the main Govt. department.

In Sept 1990, crores of Hindus of our country donated 1 rupee each, to conduct the Shila Pujan of the Ram Mandir. In Hindu faith, Shila Pujan is a religious ceremony conducted to purify the land as well as the souls of the men who're supposed to do the construction. This senior citizen was 32 years old then and had a job of 6 years at a national bank. He had a very simple salary. His parents and elder brothers had just come out of the burden of long held family debts. Not all his brothers were as educated and stably employed as him, some were struggling to make their ends meet. The family understood and respected the importance of every rupee earned. However, he remained committed to his chosen cause and donated the 1 rupee towards his resolve. 

Members of RSS are popularly known as Karsevaks or Swayamsevaks. In terms of its literal meaning, Karsevak means the volunteer who offers his services to a cause for free. Swayamsevak means the selfless worker who does not expect to get anything for himself in return for whatever he does for his cause or the organization. A Swayamsevak fully owns the responsibility of managing the practical challenges of his personal life, without looking towards the organization for any help. RSS bears all its organizational and operational expenses by the contributions from its Karsevaks. One of their key annual events is Gurudakshina. This event is celebrated to remember the great Hindu practice of offering something personally dear to our Gurus. The event starts by getting together and recognizing our revered Gurus. They discuss the interesting and enlightening life lessons from the lives of Gurus like Dronacharya, Chanakya, and many others who built the great character of our nation. This is followed by remembering and practicing some of our ages-old Shikshas (lessons) like Dand Yuddha (the act of fighting with a simple wooden stick, majorly for self defence) and Niyuddha (an Indian traditional martial arts of fighting without any weapons, again majorly for self defence). Then a lot of traditional games like Kabaddi, Kho-Kho etc. are played. The energy and the light-hearted commentaries of players binds everyone in a great spirit of sports and togetherness. Finally, the end is marked by distributing a very delicious Kheer (a traditional Indian delicacy made with rich milk and rice). There is no limit to the number of servings one wants to have. This event is celebrated at all Sangh Karyalayas (offices) across the country. All RSS events are open for everyone. All local people, even those who are not a part of the organization, are invited to these events. There is no entry or participation fee. Everything is sponsored by the contributions of the Swayamsevaks, with no bindings for the members to mandatorily contribute. More than the money, the Swayamsevaks offer their Seva (service) in bringing everyone together to celebrate our culture's deep roots and its great existence.

The donation of 1 rupee might've seemed minimal even at that time. But this was an example of the fact that if everyone decides to make even slightest of a contribution, with a good intent, then the collective power of the group (Sangh) is big enough to attain big goals and make huge impacts. The matter of the Ram Mandir was so dear to the Hindu Samaj that, along with donating 1 rupee, each Karsevak took an oath with his/her blood that the Mandir will be built at that very site in Ayodhya where Shri Ram had given his Darshan in 1949. This senior citizen also took the oath with his blood.

By Oct 1990, this man was one of the most active Swayamsevaks in the Chandigarh (Haryana) sub-zone of RSS's organizational structure. Owing to the prolonged indifference of the administration towards Hindu Samaj's sentiments, a very widespread and strong agitation started. There was a call to gather at Ayodhya and demand the demolition of the dome-shaped structure, to make way for reconstructing the Ram Mandir. He boarded the train full of Rambhakts (devotees of Shri Ram) that headed towards Ayodhya. Fate of the agitation was unknown and it held promise of many unpleasant outcomes. The state administration was alert. They stopped the train in Agra (Uttar Pradesh), 500 kms before Ayodhya, and arrested all Rambhakts. So, on 26 Oct 1990, a day before the fifth birthday of his daughter, this man again went to jail. 

Over next few days, the agitation grew even more stronger. Rambhakts overpowered all blockades to reach the dome-shaped structure and started demolishing it with whatever makeshift tools they could find around. On 30 Oct 1990, the administration opened fire on the Rambhakts in Ayodhya. Many lost their lives, including Kothari Brothers who were popular for the exceptional works that they'd done for the Hindu Samaj. They'd come all the way from Kolkata to participate in the agitation. Their contributions to the Hindu Samaj and our nation were so great that Shri Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, specially invited them to be a part of the Pran Pratishtha ceremony in Ayodhya, 34 years after their unfortunate demise. When the news of the firing in Ayodhya spread, there was a spurt of anger in the jailed Rambhakts. The jailed men included members of RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal and many other Hindu organizations of our country. Many jailed men gathered at the big iron gate at the front of the jail. They were extremely angry and emotional. The jailed RSS Karsevaks tried to persuade the fellow men to get back from the gate and not do anything that might lead to situation going out of control. However, the mob became uncontrollable and the big iron gate fell. Administration was stunned by the bloody turn of events. Soon it announced that it would release all the captives, in small batches. Now this man took over the responsibility of ensuring that all his fellow RSS Karsevaks reached their homes safely. 

With the spate of unpleasant events during the agitation, this man realized the difference between the organized ideology of RSS versus the unorganized, disillusioned driving forces of other Hindu organizations of the country. Not all senior members of RSS could resist the extremely strong forces of the politics of power and vested interests. This soon started showing with the unwelcome changes in the policy making in the organization. At this juncture, this man pulled himself back from continuing to be a part of the organization. However, he resolved to continue to be a Swayamsevak and pursue his service to the society in his small personal domain, with strong and unwavering core values of RSS.

In Sep 2018, this man turned 60 and retired gracefully from a very senior post in the national bank that he'd joined in 1984. The retirement celebration was attended by more than 40 of his colleagues, along with his immediate family which also included his then 2 year old grandson. Anecdotes and farewell speeches by his colleagues spoke aloud of the selfless and spotless character with which he had served his organization and, through it, his nation. 

So this Swayamsevak completed his active service to the nation and his organization with utmost sincerity and honesty, without expecting any rewards or compensations in return for the sacrifices that he'd made in his line of duty. He always believed that being able to do good Karma is a blessing in itself, and bad Karma is settled very painfully within the very life in which you did it. However, God seemed to have kept a good account of his good Karma. To his and his family's great surprise, in 2018, Haryana Govt. announced a scheme named Haryana Shubhra Jyotsna Pension Scheme with the aim of providing a monthly pension of INR 10000 to the residents of Haryana who participated actively against the 1975 emergency and faced imprisonment. He's been gracefully receiving this pension for 6 years now. Starting July 2024, the pension amount is now doubled to INR 20000 per month. This was not it, his oath was yet to be completed.

Sometime in 2023, the Supreme Court of India settled the very long pending case to clear all constitutional hurdles for the construction of the Bhavya (Grand) Ram Mandir at the very site which was identified in 1949. After more than 33 years of his participation in the last major agitation and subsequent jail term, the Mandir was built and consecrated by placing the idol of Shri Ram Lalla at the very site for which he'd taken the oath with his blood. None of the people around him, and he himself, could sense the level of happiness and satisfaction that his inner soul was experiencing. 

He was equanimous in his external projection, like he had been known to be throughout his life. More than celebrations, he wanted the current active world of professionals to understand the importance of the event. But like I said before, most of the active professional "intellectuals" were either indifferent or confused, ironically because of their "ignorance" on the matter :). He understood now that he could make a very limited impact in his social circle as he was now retired from active life and held little relevance to the modern day intellectuals. 

Over the last three years, I have organized a good number of social, cultural, and national events in my society. However, I was holding back this time because many reasons. My project release deadline was fast approaching, I had to prepare and conduct (as the President of my apartment association) the 26th Jan Republic Day celebrations in my apartment, and I had very little hope of understanding of the spirit of Hindus and importance of the Ram Mandir in my society. However, just four days before the event, one of the modern day RSS "member" approached me with the proposal to collect funds for the event from our society members, the RSS way of funding events. I call this person a "member" and not "Karsevak" for the reasons which I want to keep out of the context of this post. I got confused at this RSS member's proposal. My heart wanted to make an attempt to create awareness and celebrate the spirit with which our fellow senior citizen community member campaigned for the Mandir throughout his active life, alongside thousands of others from the Hindu Samaj. But my brain advised me to not take this additional and demanding voluntary responsibility of trying to infuse life into dead characters, at the cost of the very limited personal time and energy that I had at that moment.

Like always, my heart won over my brain. Considering that I only had 3 days to organize the whole event, I quickly activated my network of resources to make various arrangements like catering, lighting, tent, and other associated arrangements. Based on my experience with catering price negotiations, and knowing that the intellectual members of my society would wait for an assurance of sufficient participation to enrol for the event at the last moment, I fixed a contribution of INR 300 per person to fund the whole event. This included the big expense items of lunch, tea and accompaniments. It was implicit that this contribution was towards the collective celebratory spirit of the event and not just for the food. To the misery of our current social situation and an insult to the spirit of millions of Hindu Rambhakts, people started analysing the proposed menu for the event and argued that we used to have a wider spread for INR 200 in previous celebrations. Ironically, if these people were told that in 1990 thousands of people donated 1 rupee, they'd have all argued on the relevance of the size of the contribution. They won't realize that those who contributed in 1990, including our fellow senior citizen community member, were not even close to the economic prosperity that we enjoy in today's world. Most of these people are owners of at least one flat which is worth 1.25 crore rupees, and they have handsome household incomes.

When told about the kind of response to the requested contribution, the senior citizen was deeply appalled. From the character and culture that he carries, he hoped that people would consider this contribution too less and would even want to offer more than the ask, to make the event even more grand than what was being planned. The modern-day RSS member had a different reaction. He approached me to request the apartment association to contribute for shortfalls, if any. I could not entertain this request, for the practical bindings of my conduct as the President of the association. However, in my capacity as a fellow resident, I did request my society people for a little better understanding of the intent and the importance of the event. But, in parallel, the modern day RSS member published some messages about the contributions that further confused the people. Very hurt by the developments, this senior citizen advised me to cancel the event. But, soon after, he recollected himself and his core RSS values came to the fore. Still holding on to the little hope of bringing some awakening towards good intent and character in the current world, he advised me to make the contributions voluntary. He assured that even if nobody contributed, he and a few like-minded people within the society, will bear the complete expenses. Also, the event will be open for all to attend, celebrate, and eat, without any binding for making a contribution, the traditional RSS way.

At the age of 65, he achieved yet another feet of conducting the grandest event in our society, funded by only and only voluntary contributions. 35 out of 101 flats voluntarily contributed close to 60000 rupees. Considering the earlier apprehensions of many members for the meagre contribution of 300, nobody imagined this big a collection. So, once again, the destiny rewarded the little hope and the pure intent of this man. 

So all the arrangements were in place on 21st Jan. I was extremely tired at the end of the day. I had a big responsibility at my workplace, to provide hyper-care for the project which I managed to release a week before the planned release date of 23rd Jan. In addition to this, I had to coordinate with multiple vendors, stakeholders, and people in my society to prepare for the grand event. I slept early, by maybe around 10pm. Suddenly, maybe out of anxiety, I woke up at 2am with an active non-sleepy brain. As soon as I woke up, the thought came to my mind that how big a day it would be today (22nd Jan) for that Senior Citizen. I got carried away in the line of thoughts and lost my sleep completely. That's when I penned the initial draft of this post. After a long time, I picked up a pen and my diary, and physically wrote my thoughts, instead of typing them over a laptop. At the least I was sane enough to avoid screen-time at 2am in the night :). Eventually I fell asleep again at around 4:30am and finally woke up at my usual time of 5:30am.

Early in the morning, I felt some divine purity of thoughts inside my inner self. I decided to preserve the purity by fasting till the Pran Pratishtha rituals were completed at the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. 12:20 PM was the auspicious time set for the start of the rituals. Nationwide live telecast was planned via YouTube, so we also arranged for screening the same in our apartment's celebration area. Prior to watching the live telecast together, the community decided to do setup a Ram Darbar in the celebration area, recite Aartis and Bhajans, and conduct a little Puja (prayers) to seek blessings of the almighty for our community. To everyone's surprise, few mothers dressed small kids as Shri Ram, Lakshman, and Sita and choreographed a short little scene of them returning from their exile, after spending 14 years in the forests. In those few minutes, everyone seemed to have imagined themselves to be in the Ram Yuga (era), lost in the pleasant delight and spirit of welcoming Shri Ram to their city of Ayodhya. The senior citizen's grandson portrayed Shri Ram, beautifully reciting some of Shri Ram's dialogues from the famous Indian TV adaptation of Ramayana.

Finally the moment arrived. 50 odd people from our apartment sat together to watch the live telecast of the Pran Pratishtha ceremony. This also meant the first Darshan of the idol that was being consecrated as Shri Ram Lalla, at the Garbhagriha of the Bhavya Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. I do not have any words to describe the whole vibe of the celebration area when the idol was unveiled. A moment before the moment, I searched for the senior citizen in the gathering. As usual, he was sitting at the farthest corner of the last row, away from his deserved spotlight. His eyes were glued to the screen. He seemed indifferent to what was happening around him in that moment. As the moment struck, I looked at the eyes of Shri Ram Lalla's idol and my eyes filled. I felt weightless and empty from inside. Since I was in the spotlight, I was trying hard to stop the tears from flowing down my eyes. I put my back towards the gathering and faced the screen while trying to control my emotion. I failed. I took a small backdoor exit from the celebration area and wiped my tears. I went back in to preside over the gathering, but again got overwhelmed and again had to take the escape route to let my emotions flow.

The Pran Pratishtha rituals lasted for around 15 mins. That also marked the end of our celebrations. As a general practice, gratitude was expressed towards everyone, especially to our team of organizers. When my turn came to address the gathering, I mentioned very small parts of this senior citizen's life story associated with the occasion and, with a choked throat, very proudly introduced Shri Parmod Kumar Goyal, my father, to everyone. While he further narrated parts of his long story, with my tearful eyes, I could see the respect that some of the most revered members of our community had in their eyes, for my father.

While into such deep emotions, I generally allow the emotion to play inside me - unchecked and uncontrolled. As the emotion settles down a bit, and as the analytical faculties of my mind revive, I tend to revisit what happened inside me in that moment. Looking back at it, I feel blessed to have had this experience. Most of us are aware of human emotions when we see our children or grandchildren achieve their dreams, in education, sports, professions, arts and many other domains of life. I feel that very few of us are blessed to experience our parents' very-long-held personal dreams come true, right in front of us. I still can't express in words my exact emotions in that moment, but this long account of it has helped me preserve it for the rest of my life :)...

Narrating his story

Me re-introducing my father to the community

His grandson dressed as Shri Ram, standing in front of him

 

Preserved sticker from his 1990 campaign

Preserved sticker from 1990 campaign