This story was told to me in the Indigo flight from Delhi to Mumbai by one of India’s good trainers – and a super story teller. Surprising that he has not thought of ‘Story telling as a therapy’ as a career. His name is Samir Parekh.

If you are wondering what is the connection, here is a hindu mythological story for you.

Have you ever wondered why ‘ghee’ is offerred as a sacred offerring in the Hindu festivals? Or why your grandmother and mother said ‘you should have some ghee while you eat?’

Well, a brown or black cow eats greeen grass and produces white milk. Now you may like the milk but you cannot really preserve it. To preserve it you need to heat it – and you have made sure that it lasts one day or perhaps two. Well you can turn it into curd and it may last say 3 days, but surely not beyond that.

However you can churn the curd…and churn vigorously and separate the ‘butter’ from the butter milk. Now by converting the milk into butter you have increased its life a little more ….maybe a week or a fortnight. However if you again subject it to heat it changes form..and some black particles come out of it – some are put back, and some are filtered out. However after all the heating, and stirring with a ladle…you are left with GHEE.

This is the essence of life – to build it you need a lot of introspection, outside heat, stirring, putting back, removing the black particles,….and it is the same in the case of creating an equity portfolio. You need to create a portfolio, keep looking at it, churn it (normally people keep the black particles and throw out the ghee!