what a racquet

When the markets were doing very well, many years ago, one friend asked me a simple question. “what are you investing in these days?”. Ever since I was working in the broking or the HNI wealth advisory part of the financial world, everyone normally expects me to know a lot about investing. And not the boring simple, invest regularly in a mutual fund kind of investing, but the more exotic hot stock or hot deal kind of investing. To their utter disappointment, I knew nothing of the sort. I am not a great investor. In fact I can’t be even called an informed investor. My investments style is simple. Don’t.

I have been relatively lucky. Thanks to the firm where I work, I have given a decent sum of stock options. They used to be a decent sum, till I had to sell most of them to finance the new house I purchased. So being heavily invested in the options, I saw no great need to put more money in the share market. Also my job prospect is largely dictated by the share market and hence I would want to add any more volatility to my income and net worth. And now if you add the math and the EMIs that I pay on the housing loan… you are right. No money left to invest. So by default I have no investments to be made. But ya technically I am over invested. Opposites reconciling?

So the cool answer I gave to the question was “I am investing in my health”. The greatest investment I ever made was the gymkhana membership. That is one thing we use so bloody often. We are there in morning and evening, using or should I say squeezing the most out of our membership. Thanks to that I am living my sports dream. So now I carry stuff to swim, play squash, table tennis, badminton and tennis. The tennis racquet was there more out of hope than anything else and yesterday I was most pleased to start a little bit of tennis. So that completed almost the whole circle for me. Now that that to Jispa’s training we wake up everyday morning I convinced a few friends to wake up along with as well. They too come to the gymkhana and play with me. It’s great fun and it’s good for their health. I am investing my time in their health. It’s not a bad trade off. I get my bit of exercise as well.

Well that’s it. There is probably nothing remotely insightful in this blog. Just that I thought it was dam cool, that I now actively play all the sports in the gymkhana. Of course I consider billiards and the card room out of bounds from my perspective. I just loved the fact with tennis my circle is some what complete. Especially tennis. Till we were in Dubai in the third grade, I saw my dad play tennis in the club. I used to be the ball boy at times. He had a yonnex tennis racquet or something like that. Then he got me a junior tennis racquet. It was a Wilson – made of wood. I loved that piece. It was my racquet for me to play tennis. The tragedy of that racquet was that it was of no use ever. It never ever got used. I never played tennis with it. I could only feel it and smell it. We left Dubai soon enough and in India I never did get a chance to use that lovely racquet. I always wanted to play tennis. I guess in many ways thanks to that Wilson more than anything else.

I don’t a pic of that racquet and it’s been years since I last saw it, locked in mom’s cupboard, but here is a pic that I assume comes close enough. We must have bought it in 1983 or there abouts.