The Lamp and the Ledger: What it takes to be rich
Every Deepavali, India lights a million lamps, burns a billion rupees’ worth of crackers, and then sits down to pray to Lakshmi for more. It is the only festival where the whole country, in unison, admits what it actually wants. We don’t pray for wisdom (we assume we have it). We don’t pray for humility (we leave that to the poor who are better at it). We pray for money. And I say: good for us. A nation that is embarrassed by wealth will never produce any.
So let us talk about what it takes to be rich, not the Instagram version, where wealth is a watch, a jet and a man in a gilet saying “mindset”. Mindset is what people have when they have nothing else to sell to you.
First, be honest about wanting it: The first requirement is a clear conscience about ambition. Indians are a curious people—we worship the Goddess of wealth and distrust her devotees. We call the successful “lucky” and the failed “principled”. The Marwari trader, God bless him, never had this problem. He opened his bahi-khata on Deepavali, drew a swastika on the first page and wrote Shubh Labh beside it, “auspicious profit”. Note the word profit. Not “impact”. Not “purpose”. Profit, blessed, in ink, with a witness.
Somewhere along the way, we swapped that honesty for jargon. Today’s founder doesn’t want to be rich; he wants to “disrupt”. He has disrupted nothing but his investors’ sleep, and his burn rate could power Bihar. Wealth begins with admitting that you want it, and ends, if you’re lucky, with the discovery that wanting it was the easy part.
Be boring before you’re brilliant: Here is the great secret that no wealth seminar will tell you, because it cannot be sold in a three-day workshop with a buffet: wealth is mostly boredom, sustained.
Look at the old business families of this country, the ones who survived the Licence Raj, the nationalisation, the sons-in-law. Their genius was not that they were visionaries. It was that they were consistent. They woke up at the same hour, watched the same margins, distrusted the same kind of people. They compounded not just money but habits. A rupee saved is a rupee earned, my grandmother used to say, and a rupee spent on a bad idea is a rupee that tells all its friends.
Compounding is the only miracle in finance, and it is deeply unglamorous. It asks only that you start early, stay put, and not do anything stupid. This last condition is where most of us fail. We are a nation of brilliant people who cannot sit still. Give an Indian a good business and he will immediately diversify into restaurants.
Learn to say no, elegantly: The rich are not people who say yes to everything. They are people who have perfected the graceful no.
No to the friend with the “sure-shot” tip. No to the cousin with the cloud kitchen. No to the uncle whose cousin’s brother-in-law knows a man in the ministry. No to the third house, the fourth car and the fifth-wedding-in-six-weeks that will cost you the equivalent of a mid-sized hospital.
Wealth is a defensive sport. Making it is one skill; keeping it is another, and the second is rarer. Half the fortunes in this country were lost not in crashes but in celebrations. There is a reason the proverb says that the first generation builds, the second enjoys, and the third is photographed at a polo match.
Respect risk, don’t romance it: Now, a caution to the other tribe, the gamblers. Risk is not a personality trait. It is a tool, like a scalpel, and people who wave it about at dinner parties usually end up in casualty.
The best risk-takers I have known were obsessive about what they could afford to lose. They did not leap; they measured the gap and then leapt. The rest simply fell and described it later as a leap. Every failed venture has a founder who will tell you he “took a bold bet”. Bold, yes. Also, tragically, mathematically wrong.
Character is a balance-sheet item: Nobody tells you this, but trust is the only asset that doesn’t appear in the accounts and cannot be done without. In India, where so much business still runs on a handshake, a phone call and one’s father’s reputation, your word is your working capital.
I have seen men with spectacular intelligence ruined by small deceits, and men of modest talent made prosperous by a simple habit: they paid on time, they said what they meant and they never, ever lied to a banker or a brother. The market forgives incompetence faster than it forgives dishonesty. Incompetence can be retrained. Dishonesty has to be remembered, and in India we have excellent memories, particularly for other people’s sins.
Be generous, and not only for the photograph: There is, finally, the matter of what money is for. The wealthy who hoard are poor in ways that don’t show up in the Forbes list. They own everything and enjoy nothing, rather like a museum curator who isn’t allowed to touch the paintings.
Deepavali is instructive here. Lakshmi, we are told, goes where lamps are lit and doors are open. A closed house, however well-furnished, gets no visitor. Generosity is not charity; it is circulation. Money is what moves returns with friends. And I don’t mean the generosity of the cheque-and-camera variety, where the cheque is large, the camera larger and the beneficiary somewhere in the background, slightly out of focus, holding the oversized cardboard rectangle. I mean the quiet kind: the school fee paid without announcement, the young talent backed without a press release, the old employee remembered when the board has forgotten him.
The truly rich I have known all shared one trait: they were hard to impress and easy to approach.
Make peace with enough: Which brings me to the final, subversive requirement: knowing when you’ve arrived.
Our culture is exquisitely skilled at manufacturing dissatisfaction. The man with a hundred crores looks at the man with two hundred and feels like a pauper; the man with two hundred looks at the man with five and feels like a clerk. Somewhere at the top sits a gentleman with a private island and a private doctor, convinced he is falling behind someone in Dubai.
Wealth without contentment is just expensive anxiety. The sages, who were notoriously bad at investing, did get this one right: there is no summit, only a series of ledges, and the wise person is the one who occasionally sits down on one and enjoys the view.
The lamp, not the fireworks: So what does it take to be rich? Ambition without apology. Discipline without drama. Patience that borders on the tedious. A well-developed “no”. Respect for risk. A reputation you’d be comfortable seeing printed on the front page. A generous hand. And a quiet corner of the mind that whispers enough at the right moment.
Notice that none of this requires a startup, a crypto token or a podcast.
This Deepavali, as you light your lamps, remember the difference between a lamp and a firework. The firework is loud, expensive, spectacular and over in nine seconds. The lamp is small, steady, humble, and lights the house all night. Be the lamp.
And if Lakshmi does arrive at your door this year, please offer her a seat, a sweet and a sensible investment plan. She likes all three. She is, after all, a Goddess of excellent taste and no patience whatsoever for fools.
Shubh Deepavali. May your ledgers be generous and your friends, even more so.
(Suhel Seth, Managing Partner at Counselage India, is the author of, most recently, WTF India: Are We Losing the Plot?)