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  • Ten years as shareholder of HDFC Bank

    Somewhere in June 2015, I got a call from ICICI Direct that I had been assigned a relationship manager and he wanted to help me with my equity investments. Being naive to the world of equities, I decided to give it a try. I met my relationship manager and he helped me setup my ICICI Direct account. 

    “Which stock should I buy to start with?” I asked my relationship manager. 

    “HDFC Bank”

    “What? And not ICICI Bank? But you work for ICICI Bank!”

    “Because HDFC Bank is better.”

    I heeded to his advice and bought my first shares of HDFC Bank. It has been ten years since that.

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  • Artist vs AI

    A wonderfully illustrated post by Christoph Niemann talking about his fears about AI. Each one of his thought is supported by its own thoughtfully designed illustration.

    Automating the creation of art is like automating life, so you can make it to the finish line faster.

    This one hit hard.

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  • Deleting the second brain

    A wonderful post by Joan Westenberg who went a deleting spree of all her knowledge base—notes, links, to do lists.

    Two nights ago, I deleted everything.

    Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever borrowed, broken, or bastardized. Gone. Erased in seconds.

    What followed: Relief.

    And a comforting silence where the noise used to be.

    For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

    But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

    And so…

    Well, I killed the whole thing.

    This is akin to the forest fires which are valuable for some ecosystems to thrive. They open the forest canopy to sunlight so that sunlight reaches the ground and stimulates new growth. Sometimes, we also need a clean slate to start with new set of ideas.

    Another wonderful excerpt from the post.

    In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight. And an idea not re-encountered might as well have never been had.

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  • Proprioception

    Ardem Patapoutian talking about proprioception in this interview where he discusses about his Nobel prize for medicine.

    The simplest test is to close your eyes and touch your nose. If you think about how you’re able to tell where your fingers are with your eyes closed, you realize it’s because of how much your muscles are stretched. It’s the same sensor, Piezo 2, that senses this. You don’t feel that the muscle in your second finger is stretched, but rather you gather all the information, and your brain forms an image of where you are and what space you occupy. And that’s why, easily, without looking, you can walk, run, play soccer, play the violin. You can do all of this thanks to proprioception. And we take it for granted because you can’t turn it off. You can close your eyes and imagine what a blind person is like, but you can’t turn off proprioception. That’s why most people don’t know about it, because it’s always there. And it’s a big philosophical message: we take things for granted when we always have them.

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  • Eight years as shareholder of Divi’s Laboratories

    My investment in Divi’s Laboratories has been my biggest missed opportunity. Eight years back—still new to equity investing—I was looking for pharma stocks to invest. During that research—not sure if I should call it research, but let’s go with it—I came across Divi’s Laboratories. I made a small investment in it and forgot about it. In the next 3.5 years the stock went up 5 times! (Figure 1) And I did not make a single new investment during that time! (Figure 2) Every time I thought “it can’t go up any further than that”. Boy was I wrong. So, so wrong!

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  • Dividing a job into tasks

    Arvind Narayanan talking about dividing job into tasks and the boundaries between them.

    …if you define jobs in terms of tasks maybe you’re actually defining away the most nuanced and hardest-to-automate aspects of jobs, which are at the boundaries between tasks.

    Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about other people’s jobs that we don’t understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don’t appreciate all the nuances.

    If this is correct, it is irrelevant how good AI gets at task-based capability benchmarks. If you need to specify things precisely enough to be amenable to benchmarking, you will necessarily miss the fact that the lack of precise specification is often what makes jobs messy and complex in the first place. So benchmarks can tell us very little about automation vs augmentation.

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  • Seven years with DSP ELSS Tax Saver Fund

    My investment in DSP ELSS Tax Saver started as a way for me to save tax. When I started, I had selected two funds for my ELSS investments, the other one being L&T Tax Advantage Fund. Back then the conventional wisdom to save tax was to invest in ELSS rather than PPF for 80C. Especially if you are young and have a long road ahead of you.

    I went via the SIP route and my initial three SIPs were in regular plan. After reading a bit more, learning about direct plans and their lower expense ratios I paused the regular plan SIP and moved to a direct plan.

    During my initial years the SIP amount was very low. You can see in Figure 1 that the total investment I made in DSP ELSS Tax Saver Fund during FY 2018-19 is just 2.2% of my overall investments. But as I was tracking the performance of DSP ELSS Tax Saver, I realised the fund was significantly outperforming my other investments—both equity and mutual funds. This prompted me to steadily increase my investments year or year. Come every April and I would increased my SIP amount. The percentage didn’t matter. I increased to whatever I thought I could manage for the next one year. I also sprinkled lump sum investments in between my SIPs—sometimes because I had surplus money to invest, others when the markets were in a tizzy due to some or the other global events.

    Figure 1
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  • Judgement over technical skill

    Alexander Kohlhofer quoting Brian Eno and explaining how judgement becomes more important than technical skill in the age of AI.

    The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement. 

    With Cubase or Photoshop, anybody can actually do anything, and you can make stuff that sounds very much like stuff you’d hear on the radio, or looks very much like anything you see in magazines. 

    So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they’re prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days, the question then is, “Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do? “

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  • Being useful vs being valued

    A post from Better Than Random talking about how being useful and being valued are two different things.

    Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler, someone who delivers on tasks that have to be done but are not necessarily a core component of the company strategy. “Take care of that and don’t screw up” is your mission, and the fewer headaches you create for your leadership chain, the bigger the rewards.

    Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction. This comes with opportunities to grow and contribute in ways that are meaningful to you and the business.

    It took me a few years to truly grasp the difference. If you’re valued, you’ll likely see a clear path for advancement and development, you might get more strategic roles and involvement in key decisions. If you are just useful, your role might feel more stagnant.

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  • Six years as shareholder of Dabur

    There is really nothing for me to write about my investment in Dabur. Just like D Mart, the journey has been a painful one. The XIRR (Figure 1) has snaked around the 0% value on the X axis since last six years and as of today it stands at -4.2%. In contrast the Nifty Next 50—of which Dabur is part of—is at an impressive 19.1%. In fact, in the last six years Dabur has unperformed Nifty Next 50 for 5 years.

    Figure 1
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