When it comes to losing, people -- with an eye etched on the Bombay Stock Exchange sensitive index, or Sensex as it is fondly referred to -- are not sporting enough it seems.
Investor wealth worth Rs 5,90,000 crore was wiped out in eight trading sessions, according to the information deluge associated with the mystery phenomenon called Sensex.
Why is it a mystery when the whole world sniffs Sensex in every whiff of air that Bombay's polluted horizons offer to its teeming crowds?
Why is it that newspapers decide to let their character go for a toss to accommodate bleeding graphs which show the volatile trajectory of the Sensex the previous day, when, we are told, the bears tamed the bulls at Dalal street.
It is a mystery, because, though the sexy Sensex, even with its slight bumpy ride can wipe out or inject lakhs of crores, that fortune, or wiped out fortune, is concentrated in a select few.
To be somewhat clear what this select few means, it is one per cent of the total population of the world's second most populous country that is ours.
To make matters easy, or rather calculations less painful, let us freeze our population clock at exactly one billion and then take stock of the number of people who dabble in stocks, keep quiet when they rake in a fortune and wipe out planet earth with tears when the market falls. The figure is one crore, in a population of 100 crore.
So ninety-nine per cent of the people doesn't have any direct bearing on whether the Sensex zooms or goes on a tailspin or when there is a meltdown or bear-run or whatever crap.
So when the one per cent is fed with a staple diet of charts and graphs to supposedly guide their path to the fortunes which are just a click away, the rest would rather try and watch a game of cricket.
So when there is pandemonium in Parliament after a jittery ride of Sensex triggered by the whims and fancies of institutional investors or foreign funds or LIC or any goddamn entity, the rest of the 99 crore remains immune.
To go by the street logic, on which the great punters who scent the opportunity to make a killing in every nook and corner also relies, for the Indian retail investor, the stock market is more of a gamble. Or shall we say it is pure gamble, despite a toothless regulator, over cautious government and the circuit filters that lord over the trading sessions.
Gambling is not about winning every time. It is also about losing. May be a 50-50 chance is what conventional logic gives to the forbidden art of gambling.
But then conventional logic would to some extent seek a safe distance from gambling dens also.
So you can't go by convention in gambling. And that is exactly why the pain of losses is more vociferous than the joys with which a fortune is made in a few minutes time.
Figures given above may be far from reality, calculations awry and logic weird. Doesn't matter since figures and facts don't count much for an overwhelming majority of people to whom this aims to cater to, though a majority of people who sift through this debris of market talk could be from the elite one crore club.
Illustration Rahul, DNA
