Life is like that....!!

At first I did not recognize him; however his face seemed similar and known. After pressing a little harder on the memory chip, I recollected that he was my classmate from school.

On meeting him, I told him that he looked quite different in office attire and with a suitcase of course! “I have become a professional now.” He answered with a slight grin.

From his face I could gather the sense of victory he had in his mind. He had been working for a life insurance company as an agent and had done quite successfully. Later he also took up the agency work for mutual funds and other financial products.

As an MBA I have been infected with the habit of asking stereotype (yet intelligent looking) questions to all irrespective of our own knowledge about the entire story.

So I asked “what is the best and the worst part of your job?” “You MBAs are so much like each other!!! Almost everyone asks similar questions!!” He told this time with a slight disgust in his voice.

I wanted to protect the sheen of our creed, but sensing his anger I remained silent and seconded his opinion. At times people vent the anger of their failure by disparaging others, and this old pal of mine was doing the same thing.

If somebody is doing wrong, someone has to set him right! So I extended my inquiry and argument further after I thought that he had cooled off. “Questions may be similar but the way we all process answers may be different.” He looked back sternly, this time. However, I had made up my mind not to let it go this time, and elaborated on my question a bit. “What is it you think that makes your mutual fund products sell you think?” I waited for the answer, none came.

Finally, I thought to myself “One last try... Change the question a little bit more...” I asked “what do you like the most about stock markets, or mutual funds?”

“You know what…” he started answering, satisfying my hubris. “My life is very similar to that of a performance of mutual fund or Stock market over the long run, that’s what I like the most about it.” I kept quiet hoping that he would elaborate on what he just said. He did. “There may be crashes in between, due to reasons that are unfathomable, out of control or even out of imagination, but after some times the returns set the losses off. The only thing you need to have is the courage to bear the losses and time enough to let wounds heal on their own. One more thing, you should never try to understand it ahead of its time.”

I realized how Fickle is the power that we draw from our advantageous background, schooling, upbringing and qualification when it comes to stand up to some of the unavoidable circumstances that life has to offer. It’s something more than we study that really matters.

This episode taught two very significant things, first was that making inferences from limited data may be quite intelligent but it can be grossly unjust to apply that thing to individuals, we never really know what battles the other person may be fighting. And second was that life indeed is perhaps like Mutual funds and stock market, “full of ups and downs, signifying nothing!!”