Appalachian triumph of Apocalyptic highs and lows

Judging Hillbilly Elegy – A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by its cover is more flawed than what the over-chewed idiom generally suggests. At a time when author JD Vance is the second most important citizen of the world’s most powerful nation, it is easy to arrive at injudicious conclusions or be tempted to hard-code conjectures as irrefutable perspectives, considering how things have panned out for him ever since he wrote this memoir. 

No wonder, tons and tons of laudatory reviews and scathing critiques speak for and against Vance in impassioned tones and explicit terms. While the former group hails the work as the most definitive primer on America’s class divide, the latter accuses Vance of being an unabashed opportunist best known for his abrupt political flip-flops, someone who perennially finds fault with all around him only to showcase him as a hapless victim of circumstances who simply could do no wrong even if he tried.

There’s no point in adding another dollop of inferred opinion to an overflowing pile but I feel the truth, whether absolute or relative, lies somewhere in the middle, as it often does.

All of what Vance has claimed and done till date may not be worthy of applause and accolades, but expecting him to be ticking all the right boxes or calling his first-person work an ‘agenda’ is brutally unfair and nauseatingly holier-than-thou, given his book’s rich referential worth as a no-holds-barred account of a childhood spent amid abject poverty, violence-addicted dysfunctional families and neighbourhoods, rampant drug abuse, and scarce employment opportunities, as also of an adulthood shaped by an elusive mix of fortuitous and conscious choices.

You may not agree with Vance on every point he makes, you may find fault with his recent Munich outburst (including the Greta-Musk analogy that drew no laughs but itself became laughable), you may also appreciate why many lament his melodramatic mutation into a hardcore Republican, but you can’t ignore the gist of his real-life tale narrated in a flowing, metaphorical prose that holds your attention for most parts, never mind the few superfluous paras at the fag end that harp on the same point, much like a broken record.

I sought to dive deeper to sense whether Vance’s memoir appealed to me as an enduring piece of literature; it did way more than that actually. The written voice spoke to me with resounding conviction largely because the author has made humour in all its hues and colours his principle weapon, which prevents his moving saga from reducing to another of those sob sob tales that all rave about but no one reads. The saga of how James Donald Bowman became James David Vance is ‘unputdowntable’, a word made famous by the back covers of many a Forsyth and Ludlum novel of a now bygone era.

My favourite chapters narrate his Marine Corps stint and the Iraq posting which together helped him transform within, move from ‘learned helplessness’ to ‘learned wilfulness’, get his physical and financial literacy and health in order, and develop a more holistic and therapeutic world view. I also relished the page which recounts his faux pas during Yale’s August Fall Interview Program when an interviewer asked him why did he wish to work for a law firm. 24 carat hilarious stuff, best read, not described!

At a time when Vance could have easily disintegrated into an eddy of decay and despair like countless natives of his soil, he found both purpose and passion in life that opened the doors to a whole lot - a state university education, an almost free ride at Yale, a career path as a venture capitalist, a phenomenal stint as a senator, and ultimately a place of pride in the White House.

My favourite characters from his book are of course his ‘parents in grandparent form’ Mammaw and Pappaw. I loved the episodes recording his school progress at Math in the guiding light of Pappaw’s tutelage and his brief stint as a cashier at Dillman’s which proved to be a handy sociology class about plausible extrapolations based on the starkly different shopping preferences of the rich and poor.

Wish the book had more on how Pappaw honed his math skills in the first place as also about his typical day at Armco. Wish there was also a para on Usha Chilukuri Vance's education and career trajectory pre-and-post Yale.

Another positively intriguing character is Vance’s biological father who disowned him for reasons Vance learnt only in hindsight, making the father-son relationship extremely complex but equally profound. The author's unbreakable bond with his caring and protective stepsister Lindsay. in some ways, reminded me of the industrious brother-sister duo from Arundhati Roy’s ‘God of Small Things’.

Vance astutely embeds his bitter-sweet personal experiences within the broader cultural and historical context of his familial roots and repositioned co-ordinates, and all of them are relevant for every global citizen. Most truths he underlines are universal in essence and significance – the pain and pathos of the ‘marginalised within the mainstream’ populace, a vulnerable, peripatetic minority that is never the target audience of the government’s reformist agenda, and yet cruelly deemed ‘privileged’ by default and forced to shell out money to fund the deprived as defined by the government. Worse, majority of them lead a wayward life on the ventilator of government support and eventually dissolve into the dark pit of vanity marked by muddled notions of valour and honour.

And the scars remain even after the odd one out has managed his or her upward mobility fighting all odds. As Vance succinctly observes:

“We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is a constant exposure to the beat, whether that beat is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged woman. We become hardwired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there’s no more conflict to be had.”

“Nothing compares to the fear that you are becoming the monster in your closet.”

US or India, Europe or Africa – we find different versions of this perpetually tragedy-stricken tribe, but the woes are similar if not exactly the same. Thanks to Vance, I gained a few invaluable insights about the idyllic Appalachian terrain and its indigenous people, the trials and tribulations of holler dwellers from Jackson, Kentucky, as also the comparatively well-off life of a less-scenic Middletown in the Rust belt state of Ohio, once singularly led by Armco’s industrial strides of steely resolve. 

Why expect Vance to provide definitive answers to eliminate the sticky problems facing the working class whites of the United States; he’s only recounting his life story, not dishing out a ready reckoner of challenges and resolutions (glad he isn’t!).

Yes, there’s some room to suspect if Vance is knowingly or unknowingly one of those who decry their own to get the coveted ticket to a better life of perks and privileges. However, going by the depth and dimensions of his epic tale, we have no qualms in handing him the benefit of doubt.

We only hope Vance tunes in to the White Noise in the White House. The more he does that, better our world is likely to become (given the inescapable interconnectedness across nations now fighting more and more common demons including climate change, depleting natural resources, and a fast impending tech-driven dystopian reality no longer an imagined theme that we relished all along in sci-fi flicks)

Call it wishful thinking if you like but our ‘White Noise in White House’ expectation organically springs forth from the reading of this delightful memoir. 

One question for J D Vance, (which I asked his firm Narya and partner Colin Greenspon and got no answer)

How are the companies you invest in "defending the pillars of democracy such as free speech and capitalism." 

If they indeed are, our wishful thinking dream is already on its way to coming true.

Warren Buffet's Full Course Meal Treat: A sumptuous 'Buffett' for all seasons

Pic Courtesy: The Investor's Podcast Network

The Warren Buffett 'University' has gifted the world invaluable life and work lessons for investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and just about anyone willing to suspend judgment and relish the timeless sermons only Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger can. If you feel that the best home for a grand congregation of humor, pathos, passion, romance, suspense, intrigue, irony and inspiration is a classic film script or a best seller novel, think again! Buffett can dish out a better and more enduring fare through his earthy wit and wisdom.

Any Warren Buffett communiqué gives you all of it along with a generous sprinkling of 24-carat life lessons but his Golden anniversary letter to Berkshire shareholders was even more special. It gave the hint of an imminent good bye, but trust Buffett and his confidant, consultant and comrade Charlie Munger to rejoice the future possibilities devoid of any narcissist sermons and egoistic riders that often unknowingly creep into a communication of this genre. 

 

In a restrained yet rousing message, Buffett recounted Berkshire’s eventful past, revisits its glorious present and foresees its probable future with no trace of either wanton pride or embroidered prejudice. He began the address with a candid recall - of his 1964 error of judgment when he impulsively rejected Berkshire Hathway chief Seabury Seaton’s purchase offer of 225,000 shares @ $11.375 per share, in what was a good 50 per cent higher than the cost of Buffett’s original purchase of Berkshire shares. This would have the best of his famous ‘cigar butt’ picks but he thought against it because Seaton’s offer was ‘eighth of a point less’ than his expectation of $11.50. Instead, he bought the Berkshire stock even more aggressively. 

 

Seaton and Buffett both paid a heavy price, he informs us, for their ‘childish behavior’ (fretting and fuming over a eight of a point) – Seaton lost his job and Buffett was left with the ownership of a monumental textile headache – with a dramatically diminished net worth, zero cash and a fast approaching dead-end in the New England textile business. Buffett’s Berkshire-stricken fate was far from over though. He soon purchased a healthy insurance business out of Berkshire proceeds instead of his own Buffett Partnership Limited reserves, a decision that he regrets to this day and which needlessly locked up a lucrative insurance business in the claustrophobic cellar of a dead textile venture that was painfully co-owned with 36 per cent of the erstwhile Berkshire’s legacy shareholders. If this was not enough, Buffett acquired another dying fabric maker called Waumbec Mills in 1975 for its perceived synergies with Berkshire. Waumbec Mills breathed its last in due course but the acquired Berkshire miseries continued till 1985 (barring two years of decent operations and zero taxes only due to huge loss set-offs) until Buffett decided that enough is enough.

 

After this truthful submission, rare in any sphere of life, more so in the world of business and industry, Warren Buffett has the grace to laugh over it with a joke – “The northern textile industry is finally extinct. You need no longer panic if you hear that I’ve been spotted wandering around New England.” 

 

That Warren Buffet of today is known for all the incredibly right reasons, and that he needs no introduction, automatically put his early failures in perspective. But sharing them in toto is Buffett’s way of inspiring all aspirants and wannabes spread across the globe to keep the flame of tenacious enterprise ablaze at all cost.  We can’t think of a more enduring package of motivational literature. Unlike the preachy sermons of many a business achiever (carefully edited in hindsight to reveal the glory and conceal the gory), Buffett’s words pierce the heart and the head in the right measure and potency. 

 

In the pages that follow this formative account, Buffett narrates the phenomenal Berkshire story in inimitable style, never devoid of winsome wit, never bereft of wholesome wisdom.  He tells us how his friend, philosopher, guide Charlie Munger, a practicing lawyer and passionate architect, showed him the downside of his cigar butt theory for acquisitions of higher stakes and scales, how Charlie’s architectural blueprint designed the Berkshire of today that shifted the company’s operating tenet - from buying fair businesses at wonderful prices to buying wonderful businesses at fair prices, how Buffett learnt from experience and observation how most CEOs are oblivious of the obvious cardinal rule that ‘the intrinsic value of the shares you give in an acquisition must not be greater than the intrinsic value of the business you receive.’, how investment bankers,  accountants, consultants, lawyers and financial advisors lure you with acquisition-specific premium-to-market prices and attractive p/e multiples, how CEOs and their ever-obliging stooges have supernatural visions of ‘synergies’ even when they don’t exist, how imposing, media-savvy CEOs, enormously helped by imaginative accounting techniques, drive a golem-like conglomerate expansion spree of fundamentally weak bottom-fish mergers: designed to lure but destined to fail, how Berkshire’s structural advantages have kept it in good stead over the years: as a corporation with the ability and agility to move from sector to sector exactly in line with the prospects and value props of each and without the burden of huge incidental costs, taxes, vested interests and legacy biases.

 

More importantly, he highlights the fact how Berkshire has incisively exploited the stock market route to buy sizeable stock chunks of great businesses that prove more rewarding than outright business buyouts and have in fact funded some of Berkshire’s large acquisitions. Rather than scout for the limited opportunities of a single industry, Berkshire explores limited opportunities across sectors, consciously overlooking several better bets in the process.  For business owners desirous of sale, Berkshire offers a simulated home, he says, of retained culture and (most) people but with a new blueprint for growth. In the context of such sellers, Berkshire virtually has no competition, Buffett contends.

 
Under the head ‘The Next 50 Years at Berkshire’, Buffett strongly recommends a fresh Berkshire stock purchase only if the investor is willing to hold it for at last five years.  And he’s not in favor of using borrowed money for the purchase to safeguard against any steep fall that may not justify the leverage option. He advises all companies of ensuring - at all times - substantial and reliable earning streams, huge liquid assets and no significant immediate cash needs.
 
He foresees limited scope in percentage terms for long-term Berkshire gains from here on especially when compared to the progress report of the preceding 50 years. He estimates a time frame of a decade or two when the Berkshire directors would face a reinvestment dead-end of sorts and would have to choose between or both of the two routes of distributing excess earnings: dividend payouts and share repurchase.    
 
In the conclusive paragraphs, Buffett clearly spells out the defining characteristics of the future Berkshire CEO. The CEO would:

• Be relatively young to enable a long run at office
• Be Rational, calm and decisive
• Possess character, a broader understanding of business and good insights into human behavior
• Know his limits
• Prevent business decay by fighting off arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency 
• Spring forth from within

 

In strongly defending Berkshire’s offbeat monolithic structure, (and ruling out the possibility of any voluntary spinoffs) Buffett clearly spells out its indisputable benefits – avoidance of duplication of costs owing from separate operations, nominal management costs in the form of a single board of directors and handy tax credits emanating from a remarkable web of subsidiaries.
 
Particularly noteworthy for mega corporates back home is the anti-bureaucracy people constitution at Berkshire. As a collective of large companies as opposed to a giant conglomerate, Berkshire headquarters are completely free of committees. Budgets are not an arid mandatory exercise, only a critical internal evaluation tool.  And no legal office here, nor human relations, public relations, investor relations, strategy or acquisitions that are often ‘taken-for-granted’ in most companies, only a super active audit function. Wish several Berkshire-like entities evolve in India in the time to come. ‘Make in India’ will gain traction and momentum at one go.
 
Priceless Buffett quotes 

“When we differ, Charlie usually ends the conversation by saying: “Warren, think it over and you’ll agree with me because you’re smart and I’m right.”
 
“Post mortems of acquisitions, in which reality is honestly compared to the original projections, are rare in American boardrooms. They should instead be standard practice.”
 
“If horses had controlled investment decisions, there would have been no auto industry.”
 
“In truth, “equity” is a dirty word for many private-equity buyers; what they love is debt. And, because debt is currently so inexpensive, these buyers can frequently pay top dollar. Later, the business will be resold, often to another leveraged buyer. In effect, the business becomes a piece of merchandise.”
                                             
“Mental “flexibility” of this sort (here, Buffet is pin pointing the brazen contrast in the typical banker’s pre and post acquisition advice) by the banking fraternity has prompted the saying that fees too often lead to transactions rather than transactions leading to fees.”
 
“Charlie told me long ago to never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.”
 
“Never forget that 2+2 will always equal 4. And when someone tells you how old-fashioned that math is --- zip up your wallet, take a vacation and come back in a few years to buy stocks at cheap prices.”
 
“Cash is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent.”
 
“And if you can’t predict what tomorrow will bring, you must be prepared for whatever it does.”
 
“We will never play financial Russian roulette with the funds you’ve entrusted to us, even if the metaphorical gun has 100 chambers and only one bullet.”
 
“If our noneconomic values were to be lost, much of Berkshire’s economic value would collapse as well.”

"Nobody puts one over on Fred C Dobbs"

All the ageing Khans, Kumars and Kapoors of Bollywood can begin the new year on a fresh note of hope watching the yesteryear Hollywood superstar Humphry Bogart play Fred C Dobbs, an out and out negative character, in the John Huston masterpiece “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

This acting triumph was monumental on two counts. One, Bogart was pitted against the great Walter Hutson (John Huston’s father) who played Howard, a kind-hearted miner with a weather beaten face, clearly the film’s soul, and two, he took on this film at a time when he was ageing and balding and stuck in the image of the bow-tied sleuth of pedestrian crime commotions, and tediously known for his hyponasal and lisped speech during the fag end of his career.

Thanks to Bogart’s dexterity and Huston’s filmmaking brilliance, his character arc doesn’t lose its charm in the predictable moral failings that take such characters to the usual abyss of an destruction beyond repair. Filmmaker after filmmaker has make this downfall a fortified cliché. Not Huston!

Bogart punctuates the progressive decline of his character with aplomb, how the yearning for a secure life makes way for avarice which, thanks to the growing distrust of and disdain for comrades, becomes lethal till it turns fatal. He even manages to derive some sympathy for the delusional disaster that Dobbs turns out, which is weird given the extreme wickedness of Dobbs that has disgusting layers to it. And yet you feel like feeling for him, which is thanks only to Bogart’s surreal performance. No wonder, Daniel Day Lewis found Fred C Dobbs very helpful for portraying the anti-hero Daniel Plainview of ‘There Will Be Blood’.

The base camp for the film is Tampico, Mexico where circumstances of abject poverty bring together three musketeers of different makes and takes to embark on a gold pursuit on the Sierra Madre mountain range: one, the wise one Howard is the unassuming light house of the squad, having been there done that, two, inherently toxic Dobbs that we have discussed above, and three, the congenial adventurer Bob Curtin (Tim Holt is simply superb) who is the proverbial glue of sorts, chugging along with his two mates, seeped in wishful thinking. The mission goes horribly wrong for Dobbs and the other two are the deserving beneficiaries of life’s remainder theorem. And yet the end, minus the needless frame of Howard winking at the camera, has rich nutrients best watched on any screen of the device near you.

Some Videshi film reviewer has described the tragedy of Sierra Madre as downmarket Shakespearean. Nothing can be more discourteous to the genius of original author who used the pen name B. Traven, as also to the virtuosity of Huston and team. The Yankees are known to revere the Great Bard for the wrong reasons, and without having the slightest idea of what he brings to the table and where he becomes babyishly predictable. They will do well to keep aside Spark Notes and study the wealth of Greek literature including the Iliad all over again, and maybe even attempt to grasp the essence of the Indian epic Mahabharata. They will feel the depth of this film’s tragedy and begin to appreciate why tragedy is not about markets, both up and down.

Meanwhile, our Khans, Kumars and Kapoors can surely find at least a handful of native filmmakers with untapped potential, if they flash their torchlights on the wastelands outside the cosy Bollywood confines of their pet studios and captive directors.

These lifeboats can become their Desi John Hustons to help them move up the value chain of film acting in mainstream cinema. They can venture out of the box and yet achieve box office success, and a fresh lease of life in their autumn years.

For now, they can watch (or rewatch) the film to appreciate how Huston uses the rich metaphor of Gold Digging to convey larger truths about the futility of step-up ambition (much like the fatality of step-up loans) and the frailty of the human condition.