A confession in the summer of 2021

I've been depressed for a couple of months. I use the term responsibly. Having been there in 2011-2013 and briefly in 2017, I know how to separate healthy sadness from depression. A decade ago, I was admittedly less wise, and consequently the phase lasted really long. I was beholden to what Carol Dweck calls the fixed mindset. I simply didn't have the maturity it takes to come out of it. But it doesn't only take maturity. It takes energy, too. That's the hard part, in many ways, since depression actively attacks the very life energy it is critical to muster in order to get out of it. 

In 2017, I almost sensed its onset and started chipping away at it from the very beginning. In this instance, I had the maturity to see how it sets in, how it captures you helplessly if you give it any time to clench its paws upon the ground beneath your feet. I remember I made a four hours long call to my best friend - the call was very honest about my sadness - and yet there wasn't a hint of being sentimental about it, from my side or his. I was interested in a solution, not solace, and he helped me plan one. It worked.

This time, although I'm not as much of a hopelessly immature person as I was a decade ago, I have less energy. It is less certain the escape velocity I need I can muster. While everyone argues against being alone when depressed, I personally feel that being alone worked in my favor in 2017 when fighting it. It gave me greater freedom to be the architect of my comeback. Another unfortunate fact, this time, is that I have already given it couple of months to set in. The earlier you start rooting it out, the better your shot. And finally, and although it's a depressing thought in and of itself, this time around in my life there are things I need to prioritize even above fighting my depression.

That's just the hand I'm dealt. What I'll do with it we'll see. As of now, even I don't know. I'm not being maudlin here. I'm just putting in writing what needs to be recorded beyond any ambiguity. For my own sake, and for the sake of those whose lives I impact.

Hodge-podge

I know, I said this would be the year of reading. Of posts talking about the books I'm reading. And I read quite a bit in the first couple of months. Then life took over. 

It's OK. I cannot focus on reading books amidst what has been happening. I don't even care about the books I so meticulously planned out for this year, to be honest. 

It's in times like these that one realizes one's insignificance. There is no doubt, though, that the cost exacted for a newly humble world is not worth the prize.  

I cannot sleep. Memories from years past keep reeling before me. Memories from times I did not value and spent predominantly memorizing other more distant times, they come home to me and ask me if I like them now.

There is desperation all around. I know so many have got it worse than me. I don't know how to feel anymore.

असमंजस

सीखा अच्छे बुरे का फ़र्क़ फिर भी रास्ता हम क्या लेते 

कभी दो रावणों में चुनना था, कभी दो राम ही स्पर्धा में थे 

In praise of offices

One of the things the last year has revealed to me is how intensely people itch to (and indeed do) go to restaurants, take holidays, go shopping, and hold house parties, even during the height of the pandemic. Granted we're social animals, but the trade-off with a fatal pandemic would have tilted the balance much more in favor of staying put, I'd have thought, than it did. After all, if it were OK to talk with precision in polite society, most of these trips could be categorized even charitably as "somewhat desirable but wholly unnecessary". But even amidst all this 'being realistic and getting on with our lives', any suggestion of reopening offices is enough to make most people shudder in disbelief! "How can they do that, it's so dangerous," they'll balk at the faintest hint of it, even while on their way to the popular Sunday morning brunch hotspot.

But for all the bad rep offices get, they fulfilled a most important purpose even outside of bringing people together for collaborative work: they excused us from ourselves.

While it has been argued that working from home has played to introverts' advantage, I'd argue that introverts, in fact, will relate most with my defence of the office-going routine. As introverts fully well know, their need for solitude has more to do with not having to relate with other people, than being geographically alone. To that effect, the office, in spite of putting you in the same building as hundreds others, offered you a partial solitude. It provided a break from having to perform your personal relationships at all times: imagine the live-in with the relatives you didn't want, and thanks to your office routine, it would never come up anyway. Or the party you had no interest in going to, so you'd just work a little longer. Office was the separation from personal life that gave us a few quiet moments to reflect on the personal life. Equally, going home from work was a breather from the professional race, giving us the moments to make sense of work, to see where it fits in the larger perspective of our full lives. With office and home one and the same, there is no refuge from either onslaughts of experiences: experiences that we consume ever more voraciously but assimilate hardly at all.

In other news, I got promoted the other day, although that has nothing to do with my decision to write favorably about offices today. I do feel the crests and troughs of professional successes and failures, but ever so slightly that I feel sorry that I'm not more excited when it is good news, such as this. It's like being a buzzkill. When it is bad news, I don't feel quite as sorry about not being distraught, since the folks around also don't mind it, of course. The last two sentences are not meant to imply that I prefer bad news, I certainly don't haha. I wasn't expecting the promotion, but then I rarely expect good things to happen to me; I find that I live more peacefully this way. But I'm happy for it, mainly by the almost teary-eyed joy it brings my parents who toiled so hard on me for so many years so unconditionally and plainly. It reminds me of how inspiring they are, and that's the best part of the promotion.

Reading Progress Check-In #1

What I've read so far:

When Breath Becomes Air

King of Capital - pages 1-67

Buffett: An American Capitalist - pages 1-111

Sapiens - pages 1-18

The World - pages 102-125

Big Debt Crises - pages 1-15

The New World Order - pages 1-21

Power - pages 1-17

Thoughts:

I think I need to build more discipline in terms of making sure to finish reading a book before starting another. I've been reading a fair bit, but as we can see it has been scttered across 8 books!

Some of it is attributable to the fact that there are books I read alongside my wife (one of us reads aloud, mostly me) - those are books that are of interest to both of us - in the above list, that's:

When Breath Becomes Air

Sapiens - pages 1-18

Power - pages 1-17

Clearly, I can't really pin my bad habit on this though, since this still leaves many open books. In fact the only book I've actually finished was the one listed above, not one of those I'm reading alone:

King of Capital - pages 1-67

Buffett: An American Capitalist - pages 1-111

The World - pages 102-125

Big Debt Crises - pages 1-15

The New World Order - pages 1-21

I guess I have to make this list smaller, so for the foreseeable future I'll commit to finishing the following books where I've made substantial progress, before I read any others:

King of Capital - pages 1-67

Buffett: An American Capitalist - pages 1-111

This is, of course, in addition to Sapiens and Power, which I'll be reading with my wife per some schedule that would work for us both. 

Reading 2021

I suppose I read more than most people, but I do see how that's not really saying much given that most people don't really have a reading habit at all beyond reading social media messages and news headlines.

When I look back at what I've read over the years it seems like a fair bit, but only when I take it all in at once; it kind of obfuscates the fact that those years were mostly spent not reading at all, with episodic periods of a month here and month there where I read every day. That I have ended up reading a fair bit is more than anything just a testament to my age - I will be 35 in a couple of months and those intermittent bouts add up to something when you've been around for this long.

There is really a lot at any given time that I plan on reading, and despite that (and sometimes because of that) I often end up reading nothing. This year, I aim to change that. 

My list at this point is quite Financial Economics heavy, but there's a bit of History and Philosophy, I'm putting the list out here for quick reference and also to hold myself accountable. 

As I go through these books, I will share my thoughts on the books on this blog. I don't expect to write book reviews - I don't think I'm qualified to do that - just key takeaways or quick summaries for my own later reference. If there's a book I like a lot, I will praise uncritically, too.

Here's the list:

Finance
Efficiently Inefficient (Lasse Heje Pedersen)*
Fixed Income Securities (Bruce Tuckman)
Fixed Income Relative Value Analysis (Doug Huggins, Christian Schaller)****
Smart Portfolios (Robert Carver)
The Alchemy of Finance (George Soros)
Credit Derivatives (George C. Chacko)***
Distressed Debt Analysis (Stephen G. Moyer)
Expected Returns (Antii Ilmanen)*
King of Capital (David Carey,  John Morris)*****
Buffett: An American Capitalist (Roger Lowenstein)

Economics
Big Debt Crisis (Ray Dalio)
The Changing World Order (Ray Dalio)**
Fault Lines (Raghuram Rajan)*
Poor Economics (Abhijeet Banerjee, Esther Duflo)

Cognitive Psychology and Self-Help
Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)*
Misbehaving (Richard Thaler)
Why We Sleep (Matthew Walker)
The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg)
Atomic Habits (James Clear)
Incognito (David Eagleman)*

Philosophy
Anger (Thich Nhat Hanh)
The Art of Power (Thich Nhat Hanh)
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Edwin Bryant)
Man's Search For Meaning (Victor Frankl)

History
Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond)
Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)
An Area Of Darkness (VS Naipaul)
The World: An Introduction (Richard Haass)

Mathematics
Learning From Data (Gilbert Strang)

Writing down the list of books was helpful for another reason. It opened me to the possibility that the list may be too long and I would have to prioritize. In particular, it helped me move the following books to stage 2, as it were, in that their turn would only come after I'm done reading each of the books I've listed above:

Economics Rules (Dani Rodrik)
Mastering The Market Cycle (Howard Marks)
The Rise and Fall of Nations (Ruchir Sharma)
Applied Financial Macroeconomics and Investment Strategy (Robert T. McGee)
Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (Nicholas Wapshott)
Early India (Romila Thapar)

Footnotes:

*These books are ones I've read before, but it's been a while and I want to revisit.
** Preface with CFA L2 Reading 12 and Damodaran YT "Cracking the currency code"
*** Preface with CFA L2 Reading 45
**** Preface with CFA L2 Readings 47-51
***** Follow up with:
Accounting (Damodaran YT Course, CFA L2 Reading 21),
Corporate Finance (CFA L2 Readings 23, 24, 27, Damodaran YT Course),
Equity Valuation (CFA L2 Readings 30-35, Damodaran YT Course 'Valuation')
Equity Investing (Damodaran YT Course 'Investment Philosophies' Sessions 12-21)
Private Equity (CFA L2 Readings 37, 40)