When the Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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Conscious Capital

A monthly meetup with my mentor today and we were, as usual, talking about many things.  I told him that lately, I have been juggling a lot of content on Advaita Vedanta.  We were talking about the mind and the pure consciousness, the concept of Brahman and so on.  He told me that it was all interesting and that he was having a conversation with his wife a week ago and was asking her, "What exactly is consciousness?".  

I laughed and replied, "David, that's not a trivial question.  That's exactly what enlightened souls spend lifetimes exploring." We both laughed.  

We drifted from Vedanta to investing.  He said that he doesn't want to invest in certain companies because for him, there's a line; he doesn't want to invest in companies that don't align with his principles.  I asked him how one even decides where to draw the line.  

I admitted that my own beliefs had blindsided me in the past.  I used to think that if I didn't use a product made by a particular company, there was no point in investing there.  But after watching some of those companies multiply in value, I learned a harsh lesson.  Investing philosophy is very different from personal bias.  

"That's true," he said, "but somewhere we got to draw a line."  But for me, those lines often feel blurred.

After so many years in the industry, we found ourselves asking: what is the actual impact of wealth?  In a free world like the US, where optimism and capitalism go hand in hand, there's always an opportunity to bet on the next big thing.  Sometimes, the bet rewards you handsomely, other times, it pulls you down.  If you bet on the industry winners, you get to enjoy a few millions.  If not, then? Who doesn't want the extra cash? But the deeper question is, will it move the needle?  Would I actually feel different in my day-to-day life? Would it change my baseline happiness?

That's when David, in his usual matter-of-fact way, said

The real question isn’t whether you could have had more money. It’s whether, at your current baseline, you’ve done what you truly want to do.

That landed deeply.  It shifts the focus away from the what ifs of money, and towards the choices we make with what we already have.  

It's kind of a double-edged sword.  Am I already living in alignment with what I already have? If the answer is no, more millions won't fix it.  If the answer is yes, then the rest is just noise. 

And then, I said, "David, forget all this, and go find pure consciousness".

As human beings, we love to toy with hypothetical misses.  And for every situation in life, there is always The Road Not Taken.  But maybe the more important road is the one we're already walking - with awareness.

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