Author Archives: ZerotoBillion

Not everyday you come across a book which changes your perception of life. I’ve discussed at length how Richer wiser happier by William Green allowed me to make bigger concentrated bets and hold my winners for longer.

I recently finished Billionaires’ Row by Katherine Clarke and I’ve not stopped obsessing over it ever since. It has completely transformed the way I have thought about making it big in life by positioning of a North Star in what big actually is!

First the book- it’s the story of Skyscrappers built in New York post the global financial crisis in 2008 who share certain characteristics- they’re all at least a 1000 feet high, are all overlooking the Central Park and are of course, only available for the absolute wealthiest. Not for the 0.1%, but for the 0.001%!

I’m an absolute believer in the art of making money and have huge respect for anyone who has built generational wealth from scratch, on his own, by fair means and by paying full taxes. If only you’ve it in white can you buy a Ferrari and paint the town red. So my rock stars are the likes of Bill Ackman, Stan Druckenmiller, Mohnish Pabrai and towering over all of them is the late Rakesh Jhunjhunwala.

They all have one thing in common- they’re all first generational billionaires( not sure if Pabrai is one but he’s at least good for a hundred million). Also, they’re all into the markets- stocks mostly.

So when you’re in the field of finance, be it in banks, NBFC, hedge fund or a financial regulator, you’re all part of the game of managing money. The winners take home the most and the rest are left with peanuts. So for anyone reading this and saying, oh I am not in the race of making million dollars a year is being a fool. If you’re in the financial sector, you’re naturally competing with someone who is making a million dollar a year at least. And more often than not, you’re more qualified than him as well or have better understanding of the rules and the game also. So if you’re trading dollars and making a lakh a month and are fooling yourself that you’re doing great, the person on the other side of the trade is doing the same work but is making ten fifty hundred times more than you do and is happy to call you Sir while taking home the moolah!

Financial sector is a giant trading ring. Everyday you’re competing with each other to make money. You’re either playing or umpiring or just being a spectator but in the end the money is right there for taking. And if you’re not playing to win, you’re just being dumb!

In this context, understanding the full potential of the game is essential. So when I read about $50Million homes being normal, when I read that home by Ackman worth $90Million plus $20M for interiors, I understood wah making big smells like. When I read that if you had $10M, you might not be even able to buy the smallest condominium in there, I understood how small we are playing now. I understood why all the private bankers and hedge fund guys are so polite when talking to someone from the government or the regulators because they’re simply massaging their ego since they just don’t want anyone else competing for the fat bonus at the year end.

So this is why I realised unless you’re in it to make hundreds of millions, you’re not even playing. A person with five crore portfolio is like a club level cricketer playing with tennis ball while the real boys are playing Test Cricket. Just imagine the distance one can and has to go to achieve some semblance of success or in other words, make it big. 🍻

It’s been three years since I started this blog and it’s time to do a celebrational post. No, not for the blog but for the markets!

So the markets are at a new all time high and are digesting a full bumper majority government at the centre, like most of us are. Personally, it’s going to be a phenomenal result because the kind of infrastructure, both digital and physical has been put in motion in the past ten years must not just be brought to completion but also to fruition. India just can’t suffer another lost decade of appeasement, corruption and lawlessness like the one it had between 2004-14.

So in the past three years, markets have virtually doubled from around 11-12k to almost 23k nifty while a lot of stocks have been sensational multibaggers.

I was fully convinced since four years ago on April 24,2020 that we are in the midst of a multi year mega bull run which will make some of us who dare to dream rich beyond imagination and the same has been beginning to take shape. Every single blog since then has stated that if you bet big on India, you’ll make tons of money and it has been vindicated ever since.

Every bit of dip must be bought, every fall to be celebrated as a discounted buying price and staying invested is the name of the game. Anyone who has remained invested has at least seen his portfolio gone up at least three to four times in the past three years. I’ve said this before, it’s not the percentage gain which matters but the multiple fold wealth which results in a life changing wealth building.

This is a full bloom mature bull run taking its shape where now everyone’s convinced that we are in a bull market. If you read my blogs since 2021, you’ll see that I was talking about the phases of bull run and how crowd psychology tells you as to where are we in the rally.

Post June 4, with the official announcement of return of the current dispensation, you’ll see everyone including the FIIs turning big time positive on Indian markets. The infrastructure story, the defence story is all in the play and people have made tons of money.

Some people ask me why I haven’t bought into any of the DLFs, the HAL, Canara Bank or any other metal mining plays etc. This is the topic I wanted to share with you all today

The end game for all of us in the markets is to get rich. It doesn’t matter how you make a million dollars as long as you make one. Every big investor has made his big money in different stocks. Warren Buffet had American Express and Coke; he never had Google/Meta/Nvidia etc. Jhunjhunwala made his billion dollars in Titan and Crisil; he never had HDFC Bank or Eicher or page. So would you say that they missed the bus? No, right.

So everyone who’s in the markets for over five years ( seven plus for me now) will discover his own trading style, investment philosophy amd it may be extremely different from other equally successful imvestors.

I began my career with the PSUs, the metal mining stocks etc and even though I did make money, I was never comfortable owning anything which made me uneasy- a NALCO can fall twenty percent due to some metal news overnight; an IOC will fall thirty percent a day ( it did in October 2018 when Jaitley announced ₹ 1 , yes just ₹1 subsidy in petrol prices)or a Vedanta can go down twenty percent on a corporate governance matter.

We are in that phase of the market where people have forgotten how these companies languished at decadal lows for years together and those who are jumping over each other to buy Vedanta or third rate real estate players will do well to remember that in the eventual bear market which follows, DLF didn’t cross its 2007 peak until 2024! Yes, 17 years!

So my investment philosophy includes three essential elements

1. Low debt good, zero debt excellent- anyone who doesn’t owe anything to others can’t go bankrupt!

2. Corporate governance must be tried and tested and should only be of the most pristine standards.

3. It must be a positive secular aspiration Indian growth story

So for all the companies I’ve bought and held. TaMo had huge debt concerns but is now on path to be net debt free this year and it’s being shown in results as well. Reliance has debt but has at least three lakh crores in cash so that’s not an issue.

I just don’t want any company who can either go bankrupt due to debt or bad management. And for the love of PSUs, I just am too capitalistic in my approach to believe that they can actually deliver once the frenzy subsides.

My investment thesis is simple- India is getting rich, Indians richer. They’re in love with luxury, better lives- cars and goods combined. They’re also madly in love with the stock markets as essentially we Indians are entrepreneurial people. Plus, the savings are increasingly being channelised to markets and it’s on an irreversible generational shift.

So you buy whatever is the core beneficiary of this trend which will outlast every war, election, World Cup frenzy etc.

This allows me to also have a multi year long term approach which helps calm my nerves when BSE fell 18% that day or when TaMo went down 12% post staggering results. It allows me to hold AMC or an ITC beyond the downetrends and collect dividends as and when due.

PS- BSE recently made a new high of ₹3264 which is pre bonus adjustment ₹9800/-. Please go and read my three year old blogs when I had said that this will be at least worth ₹10000/-. The victory is sweet!

TaMo is on track to produce Assembled in India Range Rovers beginning yesterday and it’s a huge move towards catering to the aspiration of Indians who are now in love with their luxury SUVs. Don’t pay too much attention to the short term price movements, it will at least be a double in three years from now.

So I reiterate what I’ve said ever since- bet big on India, it works!

Four years ago, on March 13, 2020, we witnessed the first circuit down on Indian markets since 2008. The COVID crisis as it came to be known had officially begun though on that day, it was more an oil shock which led to the capitulation. Yes Bank had failed a week prior and Saudis have started the oil price war which led to the price of Brent crude settling in the negative territory, albeit technically.

It was crazy time. You start your day at 4 AM with markets falling in Australia to 6.30M when SGX nifty fell in Singapore to 9:15 AM when you watched your markets fell 10% like a pack of cards without breaking a sweat. Stocks collapsed in unison and the mega caps like Reliance dropped 10-15% intraday for fun. The portfolio lost 40% in less than three weeks and it was crazy times! Nifty which was almost 11K in the last week of February 2020 went to 7500 intraday low on March 24!

Anyways, today is the fourth anniversary of the crazy day and markets have given a salute by falling across the board, with mid and small cap indices falling 5% each. The froth in PSU and select other smaller companies has cleared out a bit where some stocks have corrected almost 40%!

The erstwhile darlings such as Angel one are down 40% too and this is a sign that there is a strong churn going in the market when not everyone who has a demat account will make a million bucks in a month.

So what do I think now? Well, today’s fall was a brutal capitulation when the screen showed a near vertical collapse all day long, barring a minor recovery at midday. Is it the beginning of a bear market? No. Is the top in place? Absolutely no!

I’m a student of market history and market psychology and in my limited understanding, tops are not made when the SEBI chief warns of a bubble and the indices correct the next day like good obedient students. The tops are not made when everyone is worried if the bubble is being built and how valuations are frothy and why there should be a correction. Tops are and will be made when after two years of 40-50% index returns, at around 35-40k NIFTY the then SEBI chief or someone as prominent will defend the valuations and say that all’s well on Dalal street and in their opinion, the markets are likely to go higher.

This is nothing but a textbook bull market correction which will scare the hell out of you and many others who will miss the strong rebounds we are likely to see and then curse themselves for selling out at the bottom.

For me, the stocks which are not falling as much as their peers are going to lead the rebound and the next leg of this rally. BSE is the absolute king of the post covid run and it will be a one lakh crore company, a darling of all MF and PMS and FII portfolios in three five years and then be talked like Bajaj finance does today. Please remember, Bajaj finance was hardly 100₹ in 2014, 1000₹ in 2017 and corrected by over a third multiple times before hitting the absolute top of 8000₹!

Tata Motors is the HDFC Bank of this decade which has gone over 15x since COVID, the highest a large cap had and will see its weight in the index go from currently 1.7% to over 4% in two three years. This story is a secular decades run and the only thing which can derail this is if the electric cars stop selling in India.

The other joker of the pack is OFSS! It has been my fastest doubler and the way it’s holding up, it won’t be a surprise if it becomes the Nestle or Page of this decade! The thesis of strong growth, low float and great management is playing out very well!

It’s not on the days when everyone makes money that you give a bold call. It’s days like today which separates the man from the boys. I’m strongly bullish and if I have any money left, I’d go out and buy at a frenetic pace. When the screen bleeds, you buy stocks! This correction will be over sooner than you imagine and the rebound will be sharp. It won’t be long that the portfolios which are down 10-12% from recent highs, go up 30-40% in six months time!

PS- the Indian economy is growing like crazy. People are spending to buy better stuffs like anything. One of my friends told me about a 2023 Range Rover Velar which was sold to another buyer at no discount to the ex-showroom price after a year! In a normal world, it would have gone for at least 15% discount! The India story is real and kicking. Stay bullish, let the screen bleed red!

This week I have completed seven years in the markets. Back in 2017, I first bought some shares of SunPharma, HUL and Asian Paints as my first investments. That was also my 25th year and I was still two years away from declaring to self that investing will be my final destination.

The journey from zero in 2017, from making first 20-30k ₹ investments to now having quite a few multi-baggers in the bag has been phenomenally good. God has been kind and the journey has made me a better investor and thrown me on a lifelong pursuit of knowledge.

I titled this blog as Zero to Million for reminding myself two things- one, I started at zero which keeps me grounded and thankful for everything I have and two, a million dollars is the absolute million a normal investor must strive for. It also is a way of telling myself that what I have currently is not even a fraction of what I am supposed to make in this market and that keeps me off from losing focus and wanting to do more.

One of the most important points I have learnt is that a professional fund manager can never equal a person like me who is investing for the sheer joy of it. If you’re doing it for a salary and I’m doing it for fun and passion, I’m going to be better than you hands down. I am not often into self-praise but when you realise that some people with fancy degrees suck at basic investing is not because they’re not smart but because they lack the zeal of learning whatever there is!

For example, if a person with a lot of finance degrees can’t understand that a balance sheet is fudged and its implications are horrendous, he or she will never appreciate what bad governance can do to a company because unfortunately, governance cannot be taught and can only be learnt. Here’s an example:

Over the years, I have made some great investments and some terrible ones. Reliance Home Finance went from ₹105 to ₹0.95 in three years and yours truly lost 99%. So was the case with Yes Bank when I lost my shirt. This was all due to bad governance and nothing else. The balance sheet will never scream a fraud; you need to decipher through the arcane world of nuances in the notes to accounts.

I got off the PSU basket in 2021 for I realised that even if they will go up, like they have these days, I am not the kind of investor who will like to sleep well with a NALCO or an IOC with the fear of a news announcement from the ministry bringing an end to the party . It’s essentially a case of luck that the sector is doing well and people are going gaga but I have learnt a lesson- essentially it’s about what not to do in the markets is all there is to do!

So my investing style now encompasses to worry early, and worry a lot about the bear markets. You can’t survive for a decade if you can’t survive two bear markets. And thus the maxim, a company with no debt can’t go bankrupt. So this is one of the reason I love the stock ITC-Colgate-HUL type for they are there through the rainy days.

Investing is about longevity- longevity requires patience, grinding it out alone for years together for one multi-bagger to emerge through multiple suzlon types!

PS- Oracle has been my fastest doubler, almost on the verge of a tripler in a year. The story is beautiful, one of P/E rerating of the entire sector along with earnings expansion after a decade! Can it be a 15000₹ stock? Who knows but I do pray.🙏

This was an eventful week, even if you’re not a Paytm shareholder! Markets killed all the naysayers and put sellers on Friday with a sharp reversal in what until then looked like an uninterrupted move on the upside. Let’s talk about a few things one by one.

TaMo has come out with unbelievably good set of numbers which makes the current price of ₹880/-deliriously cheap. On a trailing basis, it’s hardly trading at 18-19 PE and like I mentioned in the past post, it’s on its way to 2000₹. Two related things have happened; one, it finally crossed Maruti’s market capitalisation after 8 years and two, it now has 14th highest weight in Nifty 50 index which I believe will go only upwards from here. The stars are aligning and with the additional production kicking in full throttle from its Ford Sanand plant, the party is now truly on.

Personally, it has been a huge multibagger and the taste of this victory is very sweet and full of money!

BSE is releasing its Q3 numbers on Monday and the Friday volumes are on a tear. At over 3.56 lakh crore notional turnover, it is on its way to do close to 20% of the market which will allow the thesis to play out completely.

Now let’s come to Paytm. In my view, it’s not going to stop at 400 or 300 but will go down to a low two digit figure in the medium term. It’s a horrible time to be a BCCI sponsor, along with Byjus but when too much money is chasing too little brains, people tend to behave as if they’re gods, when nobody is. I had long maintained that Byjus deserved to go to zero and it’s now trying to raise money at 99% discount. Read this again- it was valued privately at $22Billion and is now trying to raise money at $220 million. It’s like a stock trading at ₹100 going to ₹1/-.

If I have one piece of advice, stay off Paytm for you’ll be burnt trying to value hunt here. When the Revenue Secretary talks of money laundering charges, it’s a horrible piece of information.

I am only waiting for all these great money managers who were gung ho on Paytm until last month trying to explain how they always saw it coming.

Currently, I’m reading a book titled Chaos Kings by Scott Patterson and it’s possibly the best financial book since I the Big Short. It’s about a hedge fund Universa whose idea is to lose small money during good times but make exponential returns when the crash happens. They made over 4200% returns in three months of Covid in March 2020! Yes, over 42 times of a their money!

The principle of avoiding large irreversible losses makes a lot of sense to me and this is one reason, I’ve begun to fret about being in absolutely debt free, free cash throwing dividend heavy companies in my portfolio. I love the secular themes, the decadal stories like HDFC AMC and Reliance which in my opinion will be up 5-10x in this decade.

A large part of your effort should be to survive in the next crash and if you, like me are hundred percent invested, it makes sense to be absolutely certain that a price drop in your stocks is a buying opportunity and not a cause of concern to your financial well being. And no company which isn’t leveraged can go broke! Thus, an ITC or a Colgate survive for centuries while a Paytm rise to the sky and then in flames, all in a matter of a few years!

Longevity is precious and the companies which are alive and thriving for decades deserve that much respect, doesn’t matter what an Ashneer Grover say. The truth is, people like him or a Vijay Shekhar Sharma deserved to make a lot of money for the work they did. They, however, made a few hundred times more than they deserved and could handle. This, corrupted their very idea of looking at the world and the accompanying arrogance was born. So the next time you hear a person who has suddenly become wildly rich, be a bit cautious!

PS- JLR said its highest end Range Rover is selling like hot cake. The car and thus the stock, is aspirational!

How can’t I not brag about this one! I believe I picked this up exactly one year ago, in January 2023 at just below 3000 and slowly built up through the year. And what a move it has been! Up from around 4500 to over ₹7000/- in three days! This has been the fastest doubler of my career and I am so very proud of myself 😋

It was a pretty easy stock pick to be honest. It had a fantastic dividend yield of then over 6% with one of the lowest P/E of around 15 at around 3000-3500 levels and had nothing wrong with it. Its parent is the global giant Oracle corp, does fantastic recurring revenue business of selling banking software to large banks which throws in annual payments with no incremental costs and most importantly, the stock had done nothing for almost 10 years.

I believe I have hit the sweet spot in my journey. Once a stock which gets derated spends enough time doing nothing and tires people off; shows multiple false breakouts and then goes down again; increases its profitability and thereby its dividend yield over time and has irritated its investors so much that people aren’t willing to buy at any price is the perfect time to get in.

It sounds very easy but is extremely gruelling and nerve wrecking to stand against the cumulative wisdom of the crowds. It wasn’t easy to buy ITC in 2021 June when it refused to move above 220 for ages; it was horrifying to add to Tata Motors all the way down from 430 in January 2018 to 60₹ in 2020 covid lows and it was excruciating to keep adding BSE when for three years in August 2018- August 2018, the absolute return was zero!

So everything looks great in the hindsight but if it actually was so easy, everybody would be rich!

Investing is simple but not easy. You have to hold on to your convictions against the price action, for years together. The company might do everything right but the market just doesn’t recognise it or worse, refuses to even acknowledge. It on the other hand keeps taking less brilliant companies to fuzzy heights and everybody thinks you are nuts holding to a dumb stock.

Well, the true test of the investor is in these times. Except OFSS, every multi-bagger which I have took off in the fourth year of holding when it gave me zero to negative 40% in the first three! So I don’t even worry if the stock doesn’t move for a year or two. I just don’t like the idea of selling out on price action as that’s the cardinal sin of long term investing.

I only have one regret of not building up the position of OFSS double the one I currently have. Well, that’s the problem of investing. Your ideas are more than the money you can put in. And your top three positions will always invariably be added more because they’re there for a reason. I am however sure that the rally in OFSS is exactly about the low float plus low ownership which I had elaborated in a previous blog about how BSE was benefitting from such a move.

In case of OFSS, there’s hardly any share available in the market and thus the scarcity premium is working to our maximum advantage. It alaways happen the same way. It still remains cheap compared to its peers and with a profit jump of 70%, it’s expected dividend will top ₹250-270 this year and that’s a four per cent yield even now! At an EPS of around 270, it’s still trading at 25x almost trailing earnings and with its growth rate, remains a fantastic buy. The leader of the COVID tech bull run was Tata Elxsi and LTI; OFSS might do the same this time! And if the PE are rating does happen, you can’t rule out a 60-80x multiple or a ₹17000-20000₹ stock price! Who knows!

PS- I now believe that the erstwhile dear ones like the HDFC-Kotak-BajajFin and Asian Paints-Berger are going to go through the decade of no return period. People are going to be so tired of holding that maybe in three years, I’d be writing a post about how I’m adding Asian paints to my portfolio!

I’ve been torn to decide as to which stock does I really love as the third best idea. The first two are clearly BSE and TaMo and BSE wins hands down for it was a micro cap when I began to invest and it still is a small cap. My bet on TaMo can’t be said to have discovered the stock for it has been the part of Sensex ever since the inception of Sensex!

There are some investors who pride themselves on the idea of having discovered a stock and they come on TV and keep repeating the fact that they’re the ones who have discovered HDFC Bank and Nestles and Eicher and Page. I mean seriously? How can you discover a publicly listed company! That idea is a formality in self-aggrandisement. Just watch TV and people, especially the Saurabh Mukerjee types come on TV and say they have discovered the beauty of a Nestle or an Astral. It works like this- some people do take a contra bet and buy distressed stocks or the out of favour large caps or unloved small caps. They make the first double or triple for the stock does well on its merits. The Stock then starts to appear on every screener and charts as it beats the markets. Then the momentum players get in and so does these PMS walas who buy when the tide is rising and then hype the stocks as the solution to AIDS!

The stock, if managed well, does well and then the mutual funds have to jump in. I can’t stop repeating that most, if not all of these fund managers are just momentum hunters who will say anything to justify their buying and sound intelligent.

Ramdeo Agarwal was talking how he only buys quality stocks like Nestle Eicher in 2017-19 and how he had held quality stocks for decades until Zomato happened. He hyped zomato in 2021 and dissed it in 2022 publicly and is back to singing praises as the stock has moved up! Such buffet like geniuses I must say.

Samir Arora was all about only buying HDFC Bank and Bajaj Finance and how he has beaten every index since inception and he never touches a PSU until SBI began to outperform the market and he quickly discovered the greatness of SBI as his top holding! He couldn’t stop dissent PSUs in 2017-20 until he realised HPCL was the stock of the season and I heard him yesterday that it also pays out hefty dividends. I mean wasn’t this the same reason why they criticised the capital allocation policy of PSU! so basically, don’t trust anyone who’s job is to sell you the idea of being rich when in reality he’s living off the commision of your investments in his funds.

So coming back to the idea of inventing ideas. There is no such thing as the first prize for discovering a stock as it doesn’t pay anything. The real prize or the only prize in holding on to the stock for the longest possible time and making the most money off it. There aren’t many people who can claim to discover Apple or Alphabet or Nvidia but there are guys who made their millions holding on to them.

I’m not too interested in self praise but I guess I have been able to discover my style of stock picking. I love a stock when it’s out of favour- be it ITC/HDFC AMC/TaMo or even Oracle Financial. It pays to look at companies when nobody wants to buy them and you literally have to pay people to buy them. Nobody wanted to hear about Colgate till July this year for it had done nothing for years. It’s up 60% this year. Oracle Financial was a dud for a decade but is up 50% since March lows.

ITC has been a double while TaMo is up a whopping 13x from COVID lows. I’ve said this before that even Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, the greatest Indian investor and possibly one of the best investors globally of all times too bought stake in TaMo around and that time for the same reason- TaMo was selling vehicles for over ₹3 lakh crore but had a market cap of less than 25k crore! It just didn’t add up. Today, the market cap is ₹2.99 lakh crore and like I have been saying, it will be a momentous occasion when it crosses Maruti’s market cap and become the most valuable automobile company in India. The distance is hardly 15k crore, or less than 5% move in stock price.

So now finally coming back to my question of the third best stock idea- I guess it has to be HDFC AMC. And no prizes for discovering as it is a no brainier cash minting machine. Its operating profit is over 76% and net profit margin of over 61%! How is it even legal! The stock hasn’t done anything on a five year basis but I believe as the market grows, it will be one of the companies who’s shares will be worth their weights truly in gold over the next decade!

So lest you guys think that I have turned this blog into a history blog, let me quickly do what I do best- talk about Tata Motors.

I have long maintained that TaMo will be a four digit stock and the price action has already taken it to an all time high of ₹800/-. It is now firing on all cylinders, especially its nuclear reactor which is the JLR. The JLR is the reason why TaMo will go to a price of over ₹2000/- and still be a value stock. Consider this fact, TaMo sold 1.01 lakh JLR cars this quarter. At around $100K per car, that’s $10B of sales In a quarter. And since TaMo has begun to break even at around 75-80k cars a quarter, the additional 20k cars per quarter or at least $2B in sales is its operating profit.

There are not many companies in India which can easily do $2B in operating profit in a year, leave alone in a quarter. Now multiply that by 4 and you have close to $8B in operating profit a year by JLR alone. Now add to that what it’s Indian business is making thanks to a resurgence in its PV sales and an upswing in the commercial vehicles business.

As TaMo is fast reducing its debt burden, a greater portion of its Operating profit will flow to the bottom line and it won’t be a surprise if it does over $2B in net profit! At close to 400 crores shares, that’s 40₹ EPS! And at 800₹ a share, it’s trading at just around 20 times earnings, half of which has already become trailing!

So a company which is growing its frees cash flow at almost 100% a year, will soon be net debt free and has a cash minting machine in the form of JLR won’t be trading at 20x but 30-40-50x forward earnings.

The PE expansion is the biggest contributor to a stock returns. Trent is now trading at over 100x its forward earnings, and so is Titan and so is Avenue! It won’t be a surprise if TaMo gets retakes and starts to command a valuation what Maruti got at its peak in 2017!

Even if nothing fantastical happens, considering the fact that it still commands over 80% of an ever rising EV market in India and smaller players with one hundredth of revenue such as Ola are getting $5 Billion valuation, there is no big a deal if as and when it’s EV business raises funds again or does an IPO, that alone will be close to $30-40B!

So my hunch is that we are witnessing an epochal shift in the way this company was valued at and it won’t be a surprise if it goes 5x in ten years from here! At over $50B in current sales, that’s 4x sales in valuation, which Maruti with its horrible products trades at currently!

PS: has anyone seen the new Velar? It’s an amazingly beautiful product with such smooth curves, almost like how an IPhone felt when it revolutionised the way we thought of phones. If a company’s products become aspirational, the valuation has to follow! No doubt LV has the highest market capitalisation across the consumer brands, in the league of Amazons and Teslas!

If you have read my previous post about reclaiming civilisational values, you’re aware of the kind of propaganda we all have faced growing up and are still subjected to in daily lives. Let me try and address as to how the ecosystem works and functions:

1. Self-anointment and distributing certificates is the biggest tool in their hands. Read a newspaper such as The Hindu. A normal newspaper report will have a citation such as “ an eminent historian Romila Thapar said this; a far right extremist organisation such as the RSS; renowned civil society activist Prashant Bhushan said that; etc” Read the adjectives carefully. Whenever they’re mentioning a person from the left, the adjective is positive and praising of the person while the reverse is true for the people on the right. So subconsciously, your mind will also refer to a few persons as eminent while use derogatory terms for the people of the other views. These historians continued to use a term “revolutionary terrorists” for Bhagat Singh and his friends who gave their lives for the nation. And they had the gall to defend it too.

I remember reading India since Independence to prepare for my civil service exams and I also subconsciously learnt this. Plus, since the papers were also set by their clique, your UPSC mains exam will also refer to Bhagat Singh as a revolutionary terrorist! This is the power of written propaganda to capture your thinking. Also, as most of us also used to read The Hindu to improve our English, we were also using these words to show off that we have arrived! The vicious circle continues unabated!

Since a large number of Hindi speaking candidates used The Hindu and their text books to prepare for UPSC, we were under the impression that if someone is writing front page article in this newspaper, he or she must be a big shot. Then we also saw them speaking eloquently in fancy lit feats so the verdict was complete. They’re the true dispensers of the gospel and the RSS must be a pretty bad organisation.

So the myth of Ganga Jamuna tehzeeb, and the orgasmic cult of the Urdu zaban and Nasser sahab and Jawed sahab as the true actors and fancy reminiscing of oh his family is from Lahore was set in our minds. Sufi music was sold as the only spiritual music worth its salt and Kun Faya Kun was the best song on planet earth. We all hated Modi because he’s a bigot and why Nehru must be celebrated for giving us democracy and saving us from regressive behaviour of the Hindu religious practices. We all loved the Pakistani actors for speaking English accented Urdu and practised shayari to impress women!

2. Satire- A leftist will always put you down if you espouse the cause of nationalism or praise your religion by either questioning your credentials in the most demeaning satire or would taunt you for not being educated enough or not belonging to a particular college etc. So if you didn’t go to Stephen’s and then Oxford, you wouldn’t be accepted as a member of the club and you’d be derisively termed as a desi. If you didn’t speak English with an accent, you weren’t smart enough and if you celebrated Diwali and didn’t know your Carols, you certainly were a person from the Gaon. If they can’t put you down on facts, they will put you down on your clothes, your accent and the college you went to. If you didn’t know Shakespeare , you didn’t know literature. If you spoke fluent Hindi, you were a desi whose language nobody understood.

3. Outright negation- how many times have you heard this line, oh Hindi is such a difficult language and we must simplify it. Ask yourself this question, if I was writing this blog in an English full of grammatical errors and didn’t use a good vocabulary, would you say that I write well? If someone uses words in English nobody really understands, he’s termed an expert orator and not a blabberer! So if I use Hindi as it should be, and because these anglicised idiots don’t follow, why should I degrade my language instead of them using it. So an Englishman using legal English language to make his point is an eminent speaker but me using Hindi as it is will be ostracised as desi! This is also fed in our brains through subtle propoganda of which Bollywood is a huge tool. Anyone who speaks fluent Hindi is either a villain or a comedian and the hero invariably was an Urdu speaker. And everyone with a place of power spoke English.

This is not just true about Hindi but about most our native languages. And these are the same people who will tell us oh who uses Hindi these days or who can even understand what Modi says! If you cut a person from his language, the root is cut from the tree and in no time the tree will die.

So this was not surprising when these two jokers Saif and Karan Johar couldn’t follow what Putra Moha meant. They’re the epitome of what this ecosystem has done to our society and how these are the people who make films which further takes us away from our culture. And if anyone who’s an Indian can name his some Taimur is still considered a star is not his fault, it’s because we have forgotten what Taimurlang did to our country through his invasions 1000 years ago. It’s our fault that we have not read history and consider it cool to name our kids Sufi, Taimur, Auliya etc!

So speaking English became an aspiration and Urdu spoken in English accent was the fastest way to fame because these people made us believe so. Every tradition, our festivals, our gods, our food habits were regressive and how we must move forward in the 21st century.

And then the trump card- Ask rhetorical questions with no relevance. Does building the Ram Mandir gives you a job. Now ask this loser a counter question that does that mean if people have unemployment, we should stop everything, every train, every airport, every hotel, every mall and give people a job! So till the point there is one unemployed person in India, we must stop playing cricket, use internet and eating out. These rhetoric’s are amplified by the leftist YouTube channels with crazy hashtags- India celebrates G-20 when millions are below poverty line in Gujrat. So you stop making every progress till people are above poverty line? But how would you generate the resources to lift people out of poverty if not by building infrastructure!

These people have a single point agenda to keep you cut off from you country, your language, your culture and your way of life so that you become the perpetual slave in their age old anti India machinery. It’s time you wake up and smell the coffee!

So this is the first post of 2024 and this is not about investing. This post is about something more important- reclaiming and owning up to our civilisational heritage and why is it so important.

Like me, most of you would have grown up in an India with middle class values wherein going to a temple wasn’t important, doing great in schools and getting ahead in life was and rightly so. We also were told that India was mostly ruled by weak Indian kings who were fighting amongst each others and this was used to their advantage by first the Arabs and later the British. Also, it was a given that our major temple/spiritual towns were dilapidated, filthy and congested with not even a notion of basic infrastructure in place. This, we were told also reflected on the fact that the religious places weren’t as important as say a Vetican is. We always dreamt of going/settling in Europe and praised their cities for the sparklingly clean roads. All in all, our country was deservingly poor, filthy and regressive.

Anyone who wore a tilak in school was looked down upon. We grew up in times when it was fancy to say, oh I’m not a Hindu but atheist when we didn’t know what either of the two meant. We said it because the celebrities and the powerful said it and we thought this was a way to prove we aren’t less progressive. I personally didn’t visit a temple for over 15 years because I truly believed my faith wasn’t important and going to a temple meant being tricked by a greedy Brahmin. Cracking jokes on religion was acceptable and truly progressive, but only on our religion.

We read in our textbooks that the only two kings worth their salts have been Ashok and Akbar, both were proponents of peace, interfaith unity and were indeed great. Ashok got us Buddhism and Akbar saved us from killing each other. And ofcourse, the only beautiful monuments were built by the Mughals and rebuilding a temple was a sin, a certificate of regressive behaviour.

We also were told that India had this Ganga Jamuna tehzeeb where we never fought with anybody but only because the RSS came along in 1980s that we had riots. That December 6, 1992 was the day our secularism died and we shall forever abhor the RSS. Talking positive about the RSS or the current ruling party at school or work led to social ostracism, punishments and remained an absolute taboo.

And weren’t the British so benevolent for giving us Railways and English?

So what am I trying to say here. We are going to witness a historic event on January 22 this year when the Pran-pratishtha of the Ramjanmabhumi temple is going to take place and a historic wrong will be made right. Now this isn’t something you’ll expect out of me, right. Why would someone as educated as me will be happy for a temple? Isnt it more important that a hospital was built at the disputed land? Shouldn’t we be ashamed that the secular state is involved in rebuilding a temple of all things? Aren’t we a secular state and does this not impinge on our constitutional values?

If you have any of the above or similar questions, I must congratulate you for being a victim of the larger left-liberal conspiracy of guilt-tripping you.

If one has to rule a large populace with vibrant culture, one must make them mental slaves. The easiest way is to ensure that the younger generation considers everything about its own heritage as filth and regressive while also selectively being brainwashed by planting a porpoganda in the name of history. Once you teach your kids a morphed history, they’re more than happy to mock their own values. And in a generation or two, they are so cut off from their own land that they begin to detest it. This is exactly what has happened with us, beginning first with the British and later carefully nurtured by the Indian state itself through its army of left-historians.

Ask yourself this question, if every civilisation which faced the crusades of Arabs was converted in less than 10/15 years, be it in Persia or in Egypt; why did India still remain the only continuous civilisation with largely the same values even after centuries of both Arab invasions and the colonial rule? The reason is that our nation was full of valour and cultural pride for which both the kings and the common men and women laid their lives for years and years together.

It was not without a reason why our temples were desecrated but we still have the place in our control. It was not without a reason why we still treat Kashi, Somnath, Puri, Ayodhya, Ujjain and Rameshwaram with reverence. If all our kings were weak and fond of opium, why is your name still the same as used by your forefathers centuries ago!

The left historians post independence used history textbooks as a potent tool to obliterate everything that was great about our past and replaced that with everything which went wrong. Like Vikram Sampath says, if Indian history textbook only has the list of wars we lost, how does India still exists? There must have been some wars which we won!

The leftists will try to either try and negate the history of our great land which they did for over 65 years since Independence or now they’re trying to guilt trap you into not calling their bluffs. They are the same lot who for 35 years since 1980s said there was never a Ram temple in Ayodhya. This was later disproved by the excavations conducted by the ASI and upheld by the Supreme Court judgement of 2019. So now they’re trying to say, why can’t we build a hospital or a library there! Ask yourself this question, does India with a gdp of almost $4 Trillion not have hospitals that unless you build one at the Ramjanmasthan, our population will not get health benefits!

These are the same people who will say, oh why are you sending a moon mission when people are dying of hunger! This argument is so pathetic that it’s laughable. They want you to close all technological research, all scientific institutions, all banks and hotels till every person in this country has been lifted out of poverty. Sounds logical. So ask them how will you generate the money to lift people out of poverty! And then they will run away like chickens. The leftists want India to remain poor, filthy, and deprived so that they can further criticise it for being so backward. Then they will say, oh Indian railway stations are so dirty. Basically, their sole agenda is to indulge in this psychological warfare using us as their tools.

Watch any American superhero movie and you’ll see them saving America from all problems. You make one such movie in India and you are a far right anti secular fanatic!

Friends, life is not just about getting wealthy. We must also read and learn about the glorious civilisation we are fortunate to have been born in. The pride in being Indians and Indian-ness must be revitalised. So next time someone try to guilt-trap you, beware and fight back!

PS- my favourite guilt trap moment was when one leftist YouTube channel was crying as to how building broad highways and airport and railway station in Ayodhya has robbed the town of its old congested lanes,and how sad is it that the people of Ayodhya can’t enjoy their evening in peace because so many tourists will visit! Just slap them hard and move on in life!

Jai Shree Ram!