📮 What the Field Teaches You
“You can’t build conviction from a Bloomberg terminal. You build it sitting in the back of a Tempo, listening more than you speak.”
I’ve always believed that great investors aren’t just analysts.
They’re anthropologists.
They watch how people buy.
They study how cultures shift.
They sit quietly at the edge of what looks ordinary — and see the extraordinary coming.
And in India, the best signal is still in the field.
I. The Chai Test
I remember a visit to a Tier-3 town in central India.
We were tracking a mid-sized packaged food company — largely ignored, seen as regional, low-margin, too small to matter.
But I wanted to see how deep their roots went.
We walked into a dusty kirana store.
The walls were lined with packs of competing brands. The store owner was sipping chai from a glass tumbler. I asked about this company’s products.
He said:
“Yeh log aate nahi, par bikta hai.”
(“They don’t even visit. But it sells.”)
That was it.
No discount. No salesforce hustle.
Just pull — built from trust, habit, and brand.
We didn’t need a channel check report.
That one line told me: this brand had earned the right to scale.
II. Two Families, One Story
Another time, in West UP, we spent the morning shadowing a DSA for a lending company.
He took us to two homes.
One — a driver’s family, with a newly bought fridge.
The EMI was half his monthly surplus, but he paid it on time.
The other — a small shopkeeper, upgrading to a washing machine.
His daughter was studying in an English-medium school.
“EMI toh sabse pehle jaata hai,” they said.
(“We pay our EMI before anything else.”)
It wasn’t about the loan. It was about aspiration.
And it told me something balance sheets never do:
Good underwriting in India isn’t just about risk. It’s also about rhythm.
Do they understand the family’s cash flow cadence? Their priorities?
You only get that from the field.
III. Silent Years
There’s a myth that great investing is about timely action.
But some of our best returns came from businesses that did nothing exciting for years.
No M&A. No buzz. Just slow, boring execution.
In one case, we held through two years of underperformance.
Peers were acquiring and expanding rapidly. Management looked inert. Investors got bored.
But on the ground, the vendors were seeing something different.
They said:
“Yeh log naye naye products launch kar rahe hain. Aajkal ke young logon ko pasand aata hai.”
(“They’re continuosly launching new innovations. There are being preferred by new generation.”)
And they were right.
In a few quarters, their innovation started to scale and was reflected in their revenue growth.
The stock rerated.
But the conviction — that came 18 months earlier, on a dusty shop floor.
IV. What the Field Teaches You
The field teaches you humility.
You learn how little you really know — and how much people are willing to tell you, if you just sit long enough and don’t interrupt.
It teaches you pattern recognition — not in numbers, but in behavior.
It teaches you that:
Brand isn’t built with just the ad budgets. It’s built with quiet pull.
Trust isn’t declared. It’s earned — one repeat purchase, one EMI at a time.
Growth doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it waits in silence, before it compounds.
And most of all, it teaches you that:
The best data doesn’t come in spreadsheets.
It comes via stories and anecdotes.
You just have to be willing to listen.
🧭 Why This Matters
In an age of AI, speed, and information overload, I still believe in slow investing.
Not because I’m old-fashioned — but because India rewards the patient.
You can’t model India on a screen.
You have to feel it under your feet.
And if you do that long enough, the field will teach you what the markets eventually will — just a few quarters early.
That’s where the edge lies.
Not in predicting the future — but in seeing the present more clearly than others.
Until next time,
Ravi Srivastava
Long-term investor | Author, Postcard from India
📬 Reflections on investing, India, and quiet compounding