Stop

The other day I happened to meet a good friend, rather a renowned and a much- lauded person. She does a yeoman ( given the hoary times of its etymology, the word ‘yeowoman’ would have been apt for my friend; unfortunately, it does not exist nor has it found its way into the modern dictionaries ) job, along with her life partner, on evangelising and spreading financial, investment and legal awareness and helping complainants on various fronts. She recounted to me the case of a well-established doctor crossing the threshold to silver sixties and a canny investor in the stock markets, losing twelve lakh rupees to a shady operator who promised him high returns on his investment. Neither did he get the promised high returns nor his capital. He had approached my friend for some kind of help and solution. When I said it can happen to the best of the people, she quite vehemently responded that I am being too simplistic and it is a case of nothing but greed in spite of someone doing well in life and amassing significant wealth. Scamsters and tricksters abound and are perhaps the greatest experts on the psyche and psychology of human behaviour, going by the millions of you and me falling prey to such scams.  

She also shared with me the instance of a mutual lawyer friend losing monies to some online peddler of goods who take the money in advance, but never deliver or delivery inferior products which are unusable. Quite simply, many of these cons do not offer the option of cash on delivery  and in a moment of want and impetuosity many pay up the money. My friend was disdainful and disappointed that an educated person can do such mistakes and expect her to effectively help when loot and scoot is the order of the online world. There are millions of daily transactions on the net, many of them, if not all, heavily discounted and sold by seamy sellers. Here again, it is the lure of the lower prices that propel impulse purchases, which more often than not are unwanted. 

My do-good friend was distraught that people don’t seem to be learning in spite of all the knowledge dissemination sessions and workshops that she has been conducting for nearly twenty years in this space. But she plans to carry on undaunted; her purpose is to spread awareness and help people as much as she can.

Today morning, I came across the news of a septuagenarian resident of Andheri in Mumbai losing a crore of rupees to some scamsters who lured him with a low interest loan of ten crore rupees. Imagine exposing one self to such large loans so late in life and in the bargain losing out a tenth of the loan amount to fraudsters. I am certain that many of these victims would have done reasonably well in their lives and are confident of their past successes giving them wisdom to sense opportunities and navigate their way around. But obviously, they miss out the fact that there could be smarter cons pervading current times to lighten their wealth. Such frauds have become so much common place and easy that many actually making a living out of conning people, to put it derisively.  

I know a person, well past his sixties, still dabbling endlessly in investments of all kinds by juggling his monies around. All for the sheer excitement of it, in spite of an admonishing family. He looks at alternate investments, selectively invests in startups, mentors some, gets involved with social causes and education, writes regularly and generally keeps himself busy and his grey cells ticking. He just cannot remain idle and finds these activities therapeutic.  He has had a successful career and leads a decent life out of his savings and investments. He has a comfortable house to live in and his children are well settled. His spouse, a well-educated lawyer and a past corporate careerist, is more a ‘fixed deposit’ type and hardly gets involved in any significant way in all these dabbling and investments, in spite of all the counselling given to her over the years that she should become as knowledgeable and be in a position to handle the portfolio herself should she outlive her husband. She tends to be dismissive of all these counsel as morbidity and that she will cross the bridge when she has to. My friend would be squirming at this riposte, I am sure.

As a contrast to this, I have an old friend, highly educated and a respected consultant, who does not get involved in investments at all and leaves it to his wife to manage all his earnings and deployment. She is doing fairly well and my friend often tells me that he does not have the inclination or the motivation to wend his way through the tortuous investment pathways, more so when she is doing such a good job.

The above instances are seemingly disparate, but there are some interesting takeaways and learning which may hold all of us in good stead. 

1. We prepare for our retirement from work; prepare for retirement from life too.
2. Know when to stop. If we don’t stop, we are bound to fall hard. 
3. Know your strengths.
4. Develop a healthy suspicion towards everybody and everything that comes your way. This will help sift the good from the bad, the lie from the truth.
5. Use your wisdom to differentiate between greed and need.
6. Simply slow down. Life is fast paced and you cannot keep pace with it perpetually. Your heart will pump less, your lungs will gasp, your mind will slow down, your joints will creak and your bones will become brittle. Your mind may be willing, but your body will be unwilling. It will be good to have a body in working condition rather than in running condition.  
7. Gain experiences that you missed out on rather than chasing more wealth. 
8. Don’t miss any family and friend times.
9. Be stoic. Be secure.
10. Smell the roses, savour the aromas, serve the relationships.
11. Keep yourself updated, don’t give up on reading. 
12.  Screen time can make you blind to the realities of life.
13. Films are great, but don’t miss out on plays, music and comedy shows.
14.  Take a walk, slow jog, stretch, eat and drink moderately. Do yoga. Meditate. A healthy body and mind will be your only crutch at a crunch.
15. Never stop liking and loving.
16. Let go off the fluff and the superfluous.
17. Learn to walk away from negative people. 
18. Be detached.
19. You can do with less.
20. Listen more and speak less. 

As the Vedanta scriptures elaborate, vairagya is a slow, steady and studied progress over years of experiential living of the four stages of our lives, viz., brahmacharya, grihasta, vanaprastha and sannyasa. To put it in context, vairagya is a great passport to exit from the temporal world. But that would be possible only when we know why to stop, when to stop and how to stop.