A Legendary Singer Retires

 

'A Legendary Singer Retires' is a comic short story about an ever-bungling person who, in a state of drunkenness, unwittingly triggers a bizarre sequence of events that culminate in a popular singer announcing her retirement.

I have reproduced, in the post below, only the first two sections of the story. 

You can read the full story by downloading the pdf document from here.

A Legendary Singer Retires - A Short Story

It had been a while since I was last invited to a respectable home for a dinner party. After all, what host, worth his Himalayan salt, would countenance a guest who, after feasting on his expensive single malt and gourmet food, blithely goes ahead and mocks his beloved ancestors? And that is what, my dear readers, I did some two years ago. 

It made me a social outcast for a good seventeen months! 

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Ravi, a former business-school batchmate of mine, and his wife, Sai, had hosted a housewarming party one evening. In attendance were a bunch of people from the corporate world, a drab world I had stopped inhabiting many summers ago. They all looked the same, had the same hairstyle, wore similar dresses, and talked and behaved in much the same fashion. It was difficult to tell one from the other from even ten feet, if you know what I mean. 

Later, the hosts, with their not-so-subtle intent to show off how many millions they had splurged, took us around to give a guided tour of their fancy new nest. The interiors were opulent, and the place was dotted with artefacts, which, they claimed, they had picked up during their travels around the world. A claim I seriously doubted since I had seen similar artefacts being peddled to gullible collectors in the numerous curio shops at Hathipole bazaar in Udaipur. 

The assemblage of corporate clones moved in unison from one artefact to another and offered similar words of admiration in unison, “Amazing! Splendid! Awesome! Fascinating!”

I separated myself from the group to take a dekko at the goods at my own pace. Presently, I paused, a trifle amused, before two large, ornate photo-frames. I thought they, too, were part of the assorted artefacts. So, in a state of inebriation (a blissful state in which the weight of all worldly cares lifts from one’s chest), I professed my honest opinion of the gentleman and the lady whose visage, each, occupied the gilded frames.

“Say, Ravi, wherever did you get these frames from? Hahaha! The old bird in the left frame sure does remind me of the blighter who ran our college canteen. Hahaha! You remember, the one who had more chins under his meek jaw than he had hair on his pate? Hahaha!”

Ravi harrumphed. Sai rolled her eyes.

“And the lady, well, she has a leering look, much like that Italian pornstar whose films we used to watch in our college’s computer lab. Hahaha!” 

Ravi bridled. Groaned. Or had he moaned, thinking of the scenes from those films? Hard to tell, given my state of intoxication. Sai’s face flushed. In a trice, I saw it go from pink to red to mauve. The assemblage of corporate clones was silent, as if in mourning.

Ravi, now shaking like a peepal leaf in summer breeze, raised his right fist; preparatory, I thought, to shouting, “College days, zindabad!” Just then, Sai clutched his left wrist. Ravi dithered, lowered his fist, and stuttered, “They are my late grandparents … they passed away a few years ago … I – I - I loved them very much.” His eyes were moist with unshed tears.

The place went silent as a tomb. The assemblage of corporate clones swivelled their heads in unison round the axes of their necks, fixed their gaze upon me and looked with disdain and bemusement. Much like the look the supercilious staff of the Gymkhana Club would have given to the chappie who arrived dressed in traditional attire.

While half a bottle of the finest amber rested in my innards, my exterior was now, clearly, in a soup – a hot soup! It was providential, perhaps, that a few neurons were still active in my otherwise putrid brain. I gathered my wits and mumbled, “I am awfully sorry, Ravi. I didn’t know.”

“It’s too late. Let’s call it a day,” Ravi told the gathering in a dignified tone; like a mummy, un-tombed only moments ago, giving tongue.

The assemblage of corporate clones bade Sai and Ravi goodnight in unison and ambled out of the home in, well, unison. I hid myself in the assemblage and made a quiet escape, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Had a prying neighbour mistaken the proceedings for a funeral procession, a cortège, I would not have blamed him. 

I don’t know how fast the word of such episodes travels around the world these days. It seemed, on my journey back home, that even the auto-rickshaw driver was aware of the heresy I had just committed. He looked surly every time our eyes met in the rear-view mirror.

A stream of thoughts started flowing in my head.

Was the episode, at this very moment, a topic of television debates (or harangues) and social media trolling? Had I been anointed as the ‘national shame’? Gulp! Hopefully, after a few hours, the dopamine-seeking multitudes will find some other hapless fellow to replace me. Sigh! But dash it! I was only trying to be funny. The resemblance of pictures was plain for all to see. Had he been in neutral territory, even Ravi would have made the same remark, wouldn’t he? Damn, damn, damn!

#

You can read the rest of the story by downloading the pdf document from here.

Copyright © Maneesh Goal. All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: This story is entirely a piece of fiction. All names, characters, places, descriptions and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Resemblance to any actual person, place or incident is mere happenstance.

Oh, mister, mister! Why won't you offer a tip, mister?

"But the average man doesn’t wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn’t even wish to have to think."

- Jesse Livermore

A street-side beggar will never know the toil and hardship that the person, who has just thrown a rupee into his bowl, had to go through to earn that rupee. A person begging for stock-tips will never know the amount of back-breaking work that the person, who's recommending a stock to him, had to undertake to research and value that company.

The majority of participants in stock market belong to this 'beggar' category. People like me, a tiny minority, are the Atlases, the 'labour' category, who have to put in 14-16 hours of work daily, including on weekends. The populace, unfortunately, observes the behaviour of these numerous beggars and ends up forming an incorrect opinion about all market participants. It doesn't help that people like me go about calling ourselves 'gentlemen of leisure' - after all, when work is your passion, it's unconscionable to call it work, what?

Tip-seekers are often worse than the beggars you encounter in Mumbai's local trains. The local train waaley bhikari at least sing to you before asking for money! The impudent tip-seeker, on meeting a serious participant like me, first launches a broadside. 

"The stock market is nothing but an infernal casino!"
"Ah, yes, rather, quite." I attempt to put up a stoic front.
"And you, sir, are a despicable gambler!"
"At your service, man," I say, tipping an imaginary hat.
Then, realising the import of what he has just said and not wanting to antagonise me beyond the point of no return, he checks himself, regains his composure, simpers and innocently slips the question, "kya lagta hai abhi market? what do you think of the market right now?"
Looorrrrddd, nooooo, not that question again. Is zillion times not enough? How many times will I have to endure that question? Ah, devil take the person who asks it, devil take the person!
Silence. His whole aspect now pregnant with expectation. "Here, take this Baba Bengali's phone number. Call him to know the future. If I could peep into the future, I would have become the richest man on the planet," I answer with a straight face and walk away.

None of these pestilences will ever have my advice on, say, a writing pen worth Rs. 100/- But whisper a stock idea into their ears and their eyes light up, cheeks flush, an expression of profound gratitude steals over their face. Without pausing to think, without batting an eyelid, they will peremptorily instruct their broker to take up a position worth Rs. 1 million. Often even more.

"Oh, mister, mister! Why won't you offer a tip, mister?" For many years now it has been my policy not to offer tips to anybody, not even to my father-in-law. Money can never be made consistently in the stock markets on information and conviction borrowed from others. 
A popular ploy of these imbeciles, to extract a tip, is to try to guilt-trip me. "One must always share knowledge freely with others," they will say. 
Ah, I have always done that, man. Always done that. 
Nobody who has ever come to me seeking knowledge on how to trade or invest in stocks gone back an unhappy man. (To say 'nobody' would be paltering with the truth. Uncouth people and bigots are the exceptions. I will shoo them away every single time.) On several occasions, I have gone out of my way to mentor people on the finer aspects of investing and trading. 
Where these beggars are making their blooper is in mistaking tips for knowledge. Now, isn't that like asking for a ready-made dish in the name of recipe? Grossly immoral, I say!
"Okay, so you want knowledge? Here you go, man." I begin an exposition of the aspects and nuances of investing - how to evaluate a business model, how to value a firm, and all that. The idiot has trouble listening. He stares at me with the expression of a baboon who has been denied his meal. Undaunted, I persist with my speech - more a soliloquy now than a monologue! The nincompoop's patience is soon drained to the dregs. He thrusts his palm out like a traffic policeman and, cutting me off mid-sentence, says, "If you don't want to give a tip, then don't give. Please, don't waste my time blathering."

How I wish these beggars realised that if stock-tips had any value, nobody in his right mind would give them away for free. 
(There's a certain variety of the tipster who dispenses free advice on national television. Be careful, dear old feller! These self-proclaimed experts are mere marketing agents of their employers, masquerading as altruists. If they were even half as competent as they sound on television, they would be making money in the markets as full-time investors or traders, not labouring for a salary.)

Jesse Livermore, the great American trader, had a few interesting words to say about tip-seekers:

"It has always seemed to me the height of damn foolishness to trade on tips. I sometimes think that tip-takers are like drunkards. There are some who can't resist the craving and always look forward to those jags which they consider indispensable to their happiness. It is so easy to open your ears and let the tip in. To be told precisely what to do to be happy in such a manner that you can easily obey is the next nicest thing to being happy which is a mighty long first step toward the fulfilment of your heart's desire. It is not so much greed made blind by eagerness as it is hope bandaged by the unwillingness to do any thinking." 

"Answer me, man!" I ask the supplicant who has disturbed me in that moment of serenity when I am enjoying a smoke. "What will you do after you've bought a stock on a tip? Will you regularly call up the benevolent tip-giver and grovel to know whether to buy more, sell or simply hold the damn position?" 
I blow a few smoke rings and watch them dissolve in air. 
"Do you have the wherewithal to evaluate an incessant stream of data - company-specific announcements, sectoral dynamics, regulatory developments, domestic and global macroeconomy, geopolitics, market volatility - yes or no?" 
He purses his lips. 
"If you do not know what you have bought and why you have bought it, how the dickens will you know what to do with the position? What if the tip is merely a contrivance for the tipster and his friends to unload their holdings onto gullible people like you?" 
I wait for his reaction. None. His face, as blank as a white shroud.
"Do you have the nerve to make decisions in the face of daily uncertainty? Do you have the frigging balls, the mental fortitude to stand a 50% drop in the market price of your stock?" 
His mouth's agape. 
"No, sir, you don't, I can tell. Good investing and trading is 80% about understanding human psychology and only 20% about economics."
"Uh-huh," he mumbles.
"It is no wonder that people like you eventually lose money in the stock markets. You come thinking it's easy to make money here, isn't it? - all you have to do is open an account with a broker, click a few buttons, and voila! money will come flooding in like the tide." 

He smiles a foolish smile, like the person whose cover has been blown.
"Are you serious? Is this some frigging Disney film? You think if there was any easy money lying about, the seasoned market participants would allow you to simply walk up to the table and have your fill? No, sir, you are but a naive pig, living in cloud-cuckoo land, who has been tricked and led inside the slaughterhouse for the seasoned men to butcher and make a living. Every weekend I see them dancing and carousing over the mortal remains of pea-brained people like you."

"Oye apne Sharmaji ko dekho," is a common lament of these benighted souls. They refer to an acquaintance of theirs and complain of how the fellow got lucky with a stock-tip and raked in big time. This is a common behavioural bias - we cherry-pick a few, non-representative data points, which are vivid and / or readily available to us, to help us draw conclusions, about the underlying probabilities, consistent with our world-view. In statistics we call this error 'selection bias'. Let me assure you, Mr Ignoramus, your acquaintance is merely enjoying a short-term loan from the market. He will eventually be paying it back, with an enormous interest cost to boot!

The behaviour of these mendicants, I must confess, does serve as an important contrarian indicator on occasions, particularly when the market has moved significantly in any one direction. I have benefited enormously from their foolishness. Here's how. 
In late 2007, I had to attend a wedding in central Mumbai. No sooner did I cross the threshold of the wedding ground than a goop, standing 50 metres away, waved out to me like a semaphore, ran to meet me before I disappeared into the crowd and asked, "Say, the markets are rocketing. Be kind enough and suggest to me names of two-three companies whose prices will double in two months." I uttered the choicest of expletives from around the world - in my mind, of course. Then, muttering to him, "R-group stocks," a fail-safe advice in those times, I made a dash for the reception podium. Over the course of next few weeks, I sold off most of my stock holdings. We all know what happened after that. Some dumb luck that, eh?
Few years later, in late 2011, when the world markets were fussing over the likelihood of sovereign default in the Euro area, I happened to be attending another wedding. I bumped into the same gentleman. This time, though, he chose to ignore me and passed by me without stopping to say even a perfunctory 'hello!'. Bells began to toll in my mind again. We must be close to a bottom, I thought. Alas, I had no free cash to benefit from this insight. But I got the temerity to hold on to my positions resolutely. Future events proved me right again. 
I take this opportunity to publicly thank this gentleman.
(Note: Two data points do not make a trend. And an approach that appeared to work in hindsight may well yield unpleasant outcomes in the future. I have narrated the two anecdotes only to convey that the foolishness of people around us should ring an alarm bell in our minds, and impel us to evaluate things afresh, from first-principles up.)

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"If you want to make money in stocks, do your own thinking."
"Honey, that's the hardest part."

Hullabaloo in Mulund

This is an interesting story, inspired by a real-life incident, which I was narrating to a few friends yesterday. The incident occurred in a place where yours truly has roosted all his life - Mulund, a suburb in north-east Mumbai, and which abuts the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a place pullulating with wildlife - including leopards (panthera pardus). 

Many summers ago, a leopard, bored with his quotidian life, blithely sauntered into the main bazaar area of Mulund and took up residence inside a shop in the dead of night - managing to steal in to the premises through a gap in the roofing. Next morning when the shopkeeper arrived, he saw that the jumble of cotton sheets he had placed in a corner the previous day was alive and heaving. Thinking that the thing alive underneath was a domestic cat, that regular trespasser on his premises, he pulled the sheets and screamed 'Ho!' at the denuded animal. In two shakes of a lamb's tail the hapless fellow was out on the street, all of a doodah - his breathing stertorous, eyes about to fall off their sockets, and limbs flailing like a semaphore to catch the public's attention. Shortly the leopard presented himself before the public, looking amused as he tried to ascertain the reason for the commotion. Being an intelligent animal, he surmised that, perhaps, the public was expecting him to perform some acrobatic feats. Always eager to oblige discerning viewers, he started leaping from roof to roof, pausing only to snarl and display the immaculate dental architecture inside his mouth. A pandemonium ensued in the bazaar, some people clutched at their throats like stage actors and screamed, others simply ran for their lives. One chappie, however, demonstrating admirable presence of mind, rang for the forest officials. The party of forest guards & officials arrived half an hour later, and it took them another five hours to trap the leopard.

The shopkeeper, I am told, was never the same man again. After a few weeks of the incident, he folded his tent and retired to his ancestral village to ponder over the meaning of life.

The Haughty Diner: An Absurdist Piece on Our Times

My wife and I were dining, last weekend, at a peaceful, suburban restaurant when an interesting incident occurred.

A swarthy, corpulent man strode in with the swagger and nonchalance of a queen pig arriving at the royal pigsty. He was wearing loose, green trousers and a purple bush-shirt. He and his family seated themselves at the table adjacent to ours. The man's bottom overflowed out of the seat, like cotton-bales bulging out of overstuffed, roofless trucks on Indian highways. After a brief discussion amongst themselves, they ordered some soup and unpronounceable starters. The thingamajig's exaggerated gestures kept catching my attention all the while.

When the soup arrived and was being served, the waiter's hands trembled a trifle too much and some liquid spilled on the table cloth. The beast screamed at the waiter, "Don't you know how to serve soup? you bloody anti-national!" The words rang like gunshots in an abandoned monument! Diners at every other table in the restaurant swivelled their heads round the axes of their necks, fixed their gaze on this pestilence and inspected him with disdain and bemusement, behaving as would have the members of British gentry upon discovering Gunga Din dining in their midst at an upscale restaurant in London! The waiter, whose face had turned mauve with shame, muttered a few incoherent words of apology and withdrew, staggering, to the cloak room - after all, neither the maître d’ nor any of the patrons, including me, had come to the hapless waiter's defence! But the uncouth man, blissfully unmindful of everything, simply stayed focused on the task at hand - 'slurp! slurp!.... munch! munch!.... burp! burp!... fart! fart!'

Thankfully, we had reached the end of what was otherwise a wonderful dinner. In a short while we exited the restaurant, thereby sparing ourselves any further horrors.

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Disclaimer: The above story is entirely a piece of fiction. Resemblance to any person or incident is mere happenstance.

What is absurdist humour?

Wikipedia defines surreal or absurdist humour as: a form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning, producing events and behaviours that are obviously illogical. Constructions of surreal humour tend to involve bizarre juxtapositions, non-sequiturs, irrational or absurd situations and expressions of nonsense.