Swami was worried last evening. I realized it by seeing the way he walked into the cafe for our coffee meet.
“The next few months are going to be bad for the markets,” he said. “But I think it is a good time to buy mid-cap stocks now. Do you have some ideas in mind for my retirement corpus?” he asked Jigneshbhai.
Meanwhile, our wise friend was unperturbed sipping his coffee, neglecting whatever Swami said altogether.
“When I was 20, I realized that I was overweight,” he said. He had a pamphlet in his hand. It was from the local gym in our neighbourhood. It had a ‘special membership offer’ for the new year. He kept it on our table.
“Binged on new year parties? No problem. Pump yourself up into shape. For only 7999/-,” it said.
Nothing irritates Swami more than this neglect. He stared at me first, and then at Jigneshbhai.
“I am asking you something much more important. I want to know the midcap stocks I must buy for retirement, now that the market is down. Did you hear me?” Swami asked.
Jigneshbhai gave him the royal neglect yet again.
“Every time I reached a level of weight where it started becoming overbearing, I started to exercise,” he said. “The kind of exercise kept changing. Sometimes it was jogging. At other times, it was strength training. I used to reduce some weight for a while. But it never amounted to much over the long term,” he continued.
It left us non-plussed. Here was Swami jumping around about the markets, and Jigneshbhai was talking about pumping weights.
“Has he gone crazy?” Swami asked me, trying to spur our friend. “Why is he talking about weight loss when I am asking him about midcap stocks? We know he has cut his weight finally. But that was also long time back. What’s wrong with him?”
Jigneshbhai had a faint smile on his lips.
“Yes, it took me a long time to understand what matters. And by long time, I mean 19 years. This yoyo of gaining weight and then reducing a little bit of weight for a while, only to regain it in a couple of years again went on till I turned 39,” Jigneshbhai said.
Now this was getting on my nerves too. Swami had gone beyond the phase of getting irritated.
“We know all this, right? Why is he telling this to us again?” he asked me. Before I could answer, Jigneshbhai had one ready.
“Wrong correlation,” he said. “That to reduce weight, you need to exercise more. No – that is not true. It was the completely wrong correlation,” he continued.
He was still on the weight loss bandwagon. But I got a sense of where he was going.
“In all honesty, to reduce weight, exercise is irrelevant, mostly. Because only food matters,” he said, and finally turned his smile towards Swami. “Much like buying the right midcap is irrelevant for your retirement corpus. Only asset allocation matters.”
Now, Swami’s eyes lit up. But not in agreement. “What nonsense!” he claimed. “Midcaps grow faster than the index over the long term.”
Jigneshbhai’s smile didn’t budge even a bit.
“Don’t get me wrong, regular exercise has many other advantages,” he started much to Swami’s irritation. “It helps you maintain weight, it helps you stay healthy, and all the medical parameters get better. But no – exercise is not strictly necessary to reduce weight,” he asserted.
He continued smiling while Swami continued getting irritated.
“So, if you obsess over exercise to reduce weight, and do nothing to your food, you are looking at the wrong correlation,” Jigneshbhai concluded.
Swami put his coffee cup on the table with a bang. “Will you stop this weight loss lecture and answer my question?” he yelled.
It caught the attention of the wealthy man in the sprawling bungalow who had been listening to our conversation from the adjoining table and now walked towards us. Jigneshbhai gave him a smile in the confidence that he had understood what he was saying.
He tapped Swami on the shoulder and started. He was known to be even more cryptic, so I wondered what he had to say.
“Midcaps are your exercise, and your savings and asset allocation are the food,” he said.
“If you obsess over exercise, maybe you will build muscle, but in an unfit body with no weight loss. That is the wrong correlation. Focus on your food for weight loss,” he said and walked away.
There seemed to be a correlation between his talk and our confusion, while Jigneshbhai’s smile had turned into a grin.
***