Coffee Can Investing: The Low Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth by Saurabh Mukherjea

CHAPTER 1
 Mr Talwar’s Uncertain Future
 ‘The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second
 best time is now.’
 —ancient Chinese saying
 An evening of celebration and reflection
 Even by the standards of north India, it was an unusually hot June evening
 with the mercury hovering at 42 degrees Celsius. As is the norm during the
 evening rush hour, all roads leading away from Noida were gridlocked with
 bumper-to-bumper traffic. However, in flat number 901 of Aviral Housing
 Society, located just five minutes off the Delhi–Agra Expressway, the Talwar
 household was celebrating a special evening.
 Yogesh Talwar beamed happily at the small gathering that had come
 together to celebrate his son’s success in the Class XII Board exams. Ronit
 had scored 93 per cent and stood third in his class. It was time to celebrate as
 all the relatives commented on what a great future awaited Ronit. As
 immortalized in the classic 1967 movie The Graduate, relatives and family
 friends congratulated the young man and told him what they thought he
 should do with his life. Dustin Hoffman plays the graduate in this super hit
 movie that made him a star, earned him his first Oscar nomination and
 captured the spirit of that remarkable decade.
 Mr Talwar felt a little uneasy about the happy predictions for his son. In
 the midst of the hubbub he could sense that something was not right, but he
 could not pinpoint the reasons for his disquiet. Once the guests were gone, he

sat in the balcony with his favourite single malt and let his mind drift over his
 own career. As he looked out towards the sea of skyscrapers—most of them
 half-completed buildings abandoned by real estate developers—that is
 Greater Noida, Mr Talwar’s mind retraced the steps of his distinguished
 corporate career.
 He had done well academically. After completing his undergraduate degree
 in engineering from the highly rated Regional Engineering College in
 Telangana’s Warangal (formerly Andhra Pradesh), he had gone on to finish
 his studies at a reputed business school—Management Development Institute
 (MDI) in Gurgaon. His MBA from MDI, coupled with a solid academic
 record, had helped Yogesh Talwar get a good job with a leading
 multinational company with an attractive salary of Rs 2 lakh per annum. He
 had stars in his eyes and the world was his to conquer. That was 1990, but it
 seemed like yesterday.
 The years had flown by since then, but even in the tumult of post-1991
 India, Mr Talwar had broadly done the right things. To begin with, he had
 married a smart girl. Kusum was a teacher at a private school in Noida.
 Kusum and Yogesh’s children, Akanksha and Ronit, were bright, hard
working and well-behaved. Akanksha was pursuing a postgraduate degree in
 biotechnology in Bangalore and Ronit was awaiting his engineering entrance
 exam results. Mr Talwar had a settled life, and yet he felt deeply unsettled.
 Over the years, especially in the last four to five years, he had started
 feeling like an underachiever despite working hard over his twenty-five-year
 corporate career. When he had started working, he told himself that he would
 retire at the age of forty. That forty had become forty-five and now here he
 was at fifty years of age. And yet, despite all the hard work, Mr Talwar felt
 almost as financially unsecure as he was when he graduated from business
 school.
 He had started working in 1990, just as India was about to open its doors to
 liberalization. It was a good time to work with a private firm. His career had
 progressed better compared to some of his friends who had joined public
 sector companies. The yearly increments were great too. For the first few
 years, the young Yogesh never needed to save. He spent his income on a

Coffee Can Investing: The Low Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth by Saurabh Mukherjea