“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.”
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.
But the house I grew up in did not feel like a liability. It felt like a story.
It is an ordinary house, tucked into a corner of a small Indian city that most people outside the country have never heard of. It has no grand entrance, no sweeping views, but it has witnessed lives unfolding in all their messy glory. Weddings, funerals, first steps, last breaths—this house has seen them all. And it exists because, more than 50 years ago, my great-uncle made what anyone with half a head for numbers would call a “bad investment”.
My great-uncle was not the kind of man one would peg as reckless. He worked for the World Health Organization in Geneva, a city of clean streets and impeccable order, a city where life made all kinds of sense. He had access to financial advisers—the kind of people who wore expensive suits and spoke in impressive percentages. And yet, instead of putting his money into stocks or bonds as they would have advised, he bought land in a small Indian city. In India, the notion of balancing property ownership with a portfolio of stocks and bonds is a luxury afforded to a rarefied few who have the means to do both. My family was not among that few.
If you think about it logically, it was a terrible move. The money he spent could have earned five, maybe ten times more if he had left it in the stock market. Instead, he spent it on a piece of dirt that would later need walls and a roof, and those walls and that roof would need upkeep, and that upkeep would need more money, and the cycle would go on forever. But it is not reason that drives such a choice but a faith in roots far deeper than any financial model can justify.
My grandfather had passed away relatively young, leaving my grandmother with four teenagers in a world that did not care much for widows, or for their children. To them, the future looked more uncertain than promising. That house became their refuge. My great-uncle and great-aunt, childless themselves, found a way to hold the family together through that house. It was a place where my family, dealt a harsh blow by fate, dared to begin dreaming again.
Over time, the house grew. First in size—another floor added, the walls repainted, the rooms rearranged. Then in memories. My father and his siblings were married there because home weddings were all that most small town people could afford in those days. When my great-uncle passed, the family brought his wife, stricken with dementia, back to the house. In its embrace, she spent her final years, lovingly cared for by my father and his siblings.
I think about my great-uncle, sitting in his Geneva office, writing out a check for land he would never live on, land that would take years of work and worry. I do not think he ever cared about the return on his investment. He did not calculate the appreciation of land value. He was not trying to beat the market. He built something, instead: a space for lives to unfold, for generations to grow. And that decision built more than just a house. It built security for people who had very little of it. Did the investment pay off?
The world turns faster now, or so it feels, and the notion of roots has taken on a strange, double-edged weight. To my generation, roots are not always an anchor. They can feel like shackles. People say the stock market is unpredictable, but, to us, owning a piece of land—solid, unyielding—feels like a much greater gamble. A house refuses anonymity. It is stubbornly tangible and demands that we confront our restlessness to stop long enough to leave a mark.
When the cracks in the foundation become too large to ignore, doubt creeps in, and a man finds himself asking if he ever should have bought the place at all. And so, people find solace in the illusion of liquid assets: money that moves, flows, never settles, promising that life’s hardest choices can always be put off or handed down to the next generation. Who has time for permanence when the future is so uncertain? Or do we prefer to believe in that uncertainty so we can continue making decisions that suit us now? Is the pursuit of “liquid assets” really about financial strategy, or is it an existential flight from commitment?
Was my great-uncle’s choice an act of defiance against the fleeting nature of life? I doubt he thought about it that way. Philosophies like those belong to people who have seen their share of peace, when the war is won and the only hungry bellies are in your grandmother’s stories. My generation came into the world after the dust of India’s socialist decades had settled. I walk through the corridors of that house, built by someone I never met, feeling security in my bones. Maybe that is why I ask these questions now, because those walls gave me the safety to wonder.
We cannot all be great investors. Most of us, if we are honest, would not even know where to start. But perhaps the value of an investment is not just in what it gives back. It is also in what it asks of us: the appetite for a life bigger than circumstance, the patience to wait, and the willingness to believe that some things are worth holding onto—even when they do not make sense right away. Perhaps some choices can only be justified much later, by those who come after us.
Ancient wisdom found in many cultures—including in Hinduism—teaches us that true wealth is to be found not in accumulation but, rather, in stewardship. And, yet, I wonder. I wonder what is lost when we refuse to anchor ourselves, when we drift through life without tying ourselves to a place or people. Is it the loss of belonging or meaning itself? My great-uncle is gone now, as is most of his family. My cousins are scattered, but they come back sometimes—to the house, to the memories, to the foundation that held us together. The house isn’t perfect. It creaks and leaks and asks for attention. But it still stands.
Sadhika Pant is a writer living in New Delhi.
