The Rooted and the Restless

There is a certain kind of madness in how people invest their money. They will tell you it is all rational: equations of risk and reward, trends, and percentages. They will talk about diversification and liquidity and convince themselves that every decision is carefully calculated. Rationality is the weapon we wield against uncertainty, but faith is really what carries us through the storms. An investment is, in many ways, an act of faith—faith in the future, in ourselves, and in a dream. The house, the stock, the bond—they are but vessels for those unspoken aspirations, the hope that the future will be better, safer, or at least more predictable than the present.

I was born in the 1990s, into one of the countless middle-class Indian families that were sprouting like saplings after the rains, in the wake of the 1991 economic reforms. India was shaking off the dust of its socialist decades and finding its footing in a world suddenly wider and freer. The Soviet Union had fallen, and its long shadow over the subcontinent was gone. With it went the old certainties—about what was fair, what was possible, what the future could hold. When India opened its doors to the world, with the wind came in new goods, new ideas, and new dreams. The newspapers called it LPG (liberalization, privatization, globalization), but to the man in the street, it felt like a rebirth. Where once people had saved coins in tin boxes or trusted the neighborhood jeweller, they now began speaking of the stock market the way they once spoke of harvests and monsoons—as something capricious but vital. And my generation, which grew up in the decades that followed, latched onto it.

We are the ones who pack our lives into suitcases, jump from job to job, city to city, chasing better prospects and bigger dreams all the time. As a consequence, we have little patience for permanence. We like the stock market, and why would we not? It is quick, clever, and clean. If you do not like what you bought, you sell it with a click. A tidy little graph will show you how well—or how poorly—you are doing. Real estate, though, is something else entirely. It is slow, messy, and demanding. When my elders advise us to invest in land, many of our generation smile politely and then roll our eyes the moment they leave the room. Do they not understand? Property is not an investment; it is a liability. What if you get termites? What if the neighborhood goes bad? A house asks too much of you.