Chronicles from Mehra World: What Retirement Did to My Brain

There are few things more deeply satisfying to the soul of a gentleman than watching a green number on a screen become aggressively greener and concluding that it is somehow responding to his personal encouragement, while conveniently overlooking the years of careful planning that had actually made the whole thing possible.

I refreshed my investment app for what must have been the eighteenth time that glorious December morning and smiled the smug smile of a man who had finally outwitted Life itself. The Sensex had just crossed 86,000.

Had there been a tenth cloud above the ninth where I was currently perched, I would have climbed up and claimed it—surveying the world with the quiet satisfaction of a gentleman who believed he had solved the rather complicated business of living. The Mehras have always been planners. It is one of our more endearing qualities. Or, depending upon subsequent events, one of our more expensive ones.

Reading the famous opening lines of Robert Browning's Pippa's Song, one could almost believe they had been written in anticipation of this particular day in the life of Arvind Mehra—yours truly. I had no idea where the lark was, what the snail was up to, or whether God was still in His Heaven attending to matters celestial. I knew even less about the flora and fauna upon the hillside. All I knew was that it was a little after eleven in the morning and, as far as the Mehra household was concerned, all was gloriously right with the world.

I was exactly thirty days away from an early retirement that I had spent years planning. Aryan's marriage had been budgeted for. Armaan’s post-graduation was fully provided for. Medical insurance for Anjali and me? Done. Holidays? Accounted for. Inflation? Carefully modelled. Life expectancy? Estimated with cheerful optimism. We had thought of everything our financial advisers suggested—and then a few things they hadn't. The spreadsheets were immaculate, the investments were behaving with exemplary discipline, and the future looked so reassuringly predictable that it seemed almost rude to worry about it.

In the months leading up to my retirement, I sought the counsel of friends who had already crossed that bridge. Their experiences differed in detail, but there was remarkable unanimity on one point. Retirement was not one adjustment but the beginning of a long succession of them. It rearranges not only the life of the retiree but, in ways both subtle and spectacular, the lives of everyone who finds themselves within his immediate orbit. Some adjustments are practical. Some are amusing. A few prove surprisingly expensive. Most, however, arrive without warning and almost never one at a time, as though Life considered staggered delivery an unnecessary administrative complication.

Retirement, they insisted, was not something one mastered on the first morning. Everyone eventually found a rhythm of their own. Some stumbled upon it almost immediately. Others reached it after a few false starts. Looking back, many of them insisted that discovering that rhythm had itself become one of the happiest parts of retirement.

The financial aspect naturally receives the lion's share of attention, and quite rightly too. There is little point in having abundant free time if one cannot afford to enjoy it without substantially altering the lifestyle to which one has become comfortably accustomed. Fortunately, that particular box had already been ticked with characteristic Mehra thoroughness.

What receives rather less attention, however, is the question of routine.

For well over three decades, I had never needed to design one. Work had thoughtfully done it for me. The greater part of every waking hour was already spoken for by meetings, presentations, flights, budgets, negotiations and the endless procession of decisions that corporate life so generously provides. Even the quieter moments had a habit of being occupied by work, usually in the form of thinking about whatever awaited me the following morning.

Home, during the working years, was something one longed for. Time with the family had to be earned. Weekends were precious precisely because they were scarce, and even then they were liable to be interrupted by an unfinished presentation, an awkward client situation or a to-do list that had displayed remarkable patience in waiting until Saturday morning to demand attention.

Retired friends warned me that the equation changed almost overnight. Home, they said, suddenly became the entire programme. Every day became a weekend, but a weekend stripped of the very luxury that had once made it so precious: its rarity. Given sufficient exposure, even paradise becomes routine.

There was another warning they all seemed to agree upon. The permanent presence of the ceremonial head of the household, they maintained, had an extraordinary ability to disturb the delicate balance of the domestic ecosystem.

This I understood. Every household operates according to a remarkably efficient ecosystem.

Domestic helps arrive with military precision. Floors are swept. Furniture migrates mysteriously from one corner of the room to another before returning, fifteen minutes later, to the exact spot from which it had departed. Every available surface is dusted, wiped, polished or otherwise attended to with admirable thoroughness.

I had, of course, spent enough weekends performing my allotted role in this familiar domestic ballet to know that I was the only item of furniture not assigned a permanent location. I was therefore gently but firmly relocated from room to room in the interests of domestic efficiency, until eventually I found myself occupying whichever square foot of the house had, for the moment, escaped professional attention.

The prospect of turning this hitherto weekend performance into a seven-day opera struck me as an ambitious production. I had little doubt that the rest of the cast, Anjali very much included, viewed the prospect with equal caution.

There was, however, another consideration.

Corporate life, for all its demands, performs one invaluable service. It forces the brain to earn its keep. There are exceptions, of course. I have known a few who managed entire careers without placing any noticeable strain upon theirs. Every day presents a fresh assortment of decisions, disagreements, negotiations, impossible deadlines and problems that somehow insist on becoming your own. Retirement removes all of them in one remarkably elegant stroke.

Planning holidays, comparing hotels, researching destinations and constructing itineraries provided welcome bursts of activity. But my retired friends warned me that they were only occasional assignments.

Finding long-term employment for a mind that had spent decades solving entirely different kinds of problems turned out to be a project in itself.

Fortunately, I believed I had solved this problem.

Three other close friends found themselves confronting the very same dilemma at almost exactly the same time. It is as if P. B. Shelley had us in mind when he penned the famous line in Ode to the West Wind, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" If four senior corporate minds found themselves facing the same retirement problem, could an elegant solution be far behind?

We decided to start a small consulting firm!

Not because we needed the money. We didn't.

Not because we wished to recreate corporate life. Heaven forbid.

The objective was refreshingly modest. We wanted a reason to get dressed every morning, a few hours of stimulating conversation, and the occasional consulting assignment to reassure ourselves that our experience still possessed some commercial value. It was enough intellectual exercise to keep the machinery well lubricated, but not enough to interfere with holidays, music, tennis, reading, family, or the delightful freedom of occasionally doing absolutely nothing.

It seemed, if I may say so myself, a remarkably well-balanced retirement plan.

There was, however, one assumption hidden deep inside my otherwise impeccable plan.

I had assumed that once liberated from corporate life, my brain would quietly settle into a slower, more dignified rhythm.

It had other ideas.

As it turned out, there remained a considerable amount of unoccupied intellectual real estate between my ears and, before I had properly noticed the vacancy, a new tenant had enthusiastically moved in. Quite by coincidence, he had also just taken up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The President of the United States.

Donald Trump had barely finished taking the oath when he began generating news at a pace that made a Force 12 hurricane seem almost leisurely. It started with the mass pardons of the January 6 rioters on his very first day in office. There followed an uninterrupted procession of executive orders, memoranda and proclamations that appeared to emerge with the regularity of a well-oiled production line.

Initially, I watched with nothing more than mild amusement.

After all, the United States is hardly some obscure little republic tucked away in a forgotten corner of the globe. What happened there had a habit of disrupting stock markets, exchange rates, multinational corporations and, by extension, the carefully built financial portfolio of retired executives who had spent a lifetime pretending to understand such things.

Besides, I had always enjoyed good political theatre. This production, however, seemed determined to perform an entire season every week.

I told myself I was merely trying to keep abreast of world affairs.

It sounded considerably more respectable than admitting that I had become thoroughly entertained. My brain, I realised much later, had quietly found its new full-time occupation.

Every morning I promised myself twenty minutes—just enough to understand the latest developments. Naturally, twenty minutes became an hour. An hour quietly merged into two.

Somewhere along the way, Tata Play appeared to sense an extraordinary commercial opportunity. Having correctly concluded that retirement had left me with both curiosity and time in dangerous quantities, it quietly transformed itself into my personal Washington bureau. Erin Burnett became the official wake-up call for Indian crows. Laura Coates presided over breakfast. Fareed Zakaria took charge of Sunday evenings. Somewhere in between, I acquired a working familiarity with more American journalists than Indian ones.

Watching Abby Phillip moderate a panel discussion reminded me irresistibly of a corporate review meeting: four highly accomplished experts debating simultaneously, none listening particularly carefully to anyone else, while one heroic anchor struggled valiantly to preserve both order and dignity—and quietly wondered whether the compensation package really justified the occupational hazards.

By now, YouTube had also joined the conspiracy.

Its algorithm, having correctly concluded that I possessed both curiosity and time in dangerous quantities, began feeding me an endless procession of videos with the quiet persistence of an exceptionally efficient narcotics dealer.

"You may also like..."

No four words have ever inflicted more damage upon human productivity.

Before long, Ben Meiselas had taken up permanent residence in my headphones.

It was during this period that I made a rather startling discovery about the human brain.

For over three decades I had believed mine had been operating at something reasonably close to full capacity. Corporate life had certainly done little to suggest otherwise. Retirement, however, revealed that there remained a vast reserve of unused processing power which, until then, had apparently been waiting patiently for a sufficiently improbable assignment.

The United States of America proved equal to the task.

The undisputed superpower of the world subjected this magnificent piece of my anatomy to an endless stream of constitutional crises, executive orders, court rulings, investigations, tariffs, press briefings and political drama with an enthusiasm that bordered upon the indecent. To my considerable surprise, it cheerfully absorbed everything thrown at it with an appetite I had never previously suspected it possessed.

The whole affair reminded me uncannily of an annual corporate awards evening. Every function appeared determined to outperform every other function in generating headlines.

The White House competed enthusiastically with the Judiciary. The Judiciary sparred with the Justice Department. The FBI entered with customary vigour. Immigration authorities refused to be left behind. The media, naturally, ensured that every contestant received generous coverage.

And, in a delightful departure from established corporate practice, the Managing Director himself insisted on competing in almost every category.

Had someone pitched this screenplay to Netflix under the title House of Cards, the producers would almost certainly have rejected it as implausibly exaggerated.

Even The West Wing, Madam Secretary and Designated Survivor, taken together, would have struggled to keep pace.

Besides, as I often remarked to anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot, there seemed very little point in filming a sequel called The East Wing—there did not appear to be much of one left.

I wasn't merely following the news anymore.

I was binge-watching a democracy.

Somewhere during this period, I quietly crossed an invisible line. I genuinely began to believe that I possessed practical solutions for preserving the dollar's supremacy, restoring American hegemony, reducing crime, reforming trade policy, tackling illegal immigration, strengthening internal security and, where circumstances absolutely demanded it, suggesting a few modest amendments to the Constitution of the United States itself. Washington, however, continued quite cheerfully without the benefit of my advice, blissfully unaware that such a resource existed.

That struck me as a curious oversight. After all, I had spent the better part of three decades working for two American multinational corporations that had actively encouraged me to express it.

That disturbed me.

It disturbed Anjali even more, though for entirely different reasons.

Dinner conversations, for instance, had acquired a distinctly transatlantic flavour.

"Have you paid the society’s maintenance and electricity bill?" she asked one evening.

"I didn't," I admitted.

"But, Anjali, talking of maintenance, have you seen what's happening with the algae in the Reflecting Pool? The administration is going about it entirely the wrong way. I can tell you precisely why it will fail—and what they ought to do next."

She looked at me with the expression of someone trying to decide whether professional intervention might still be avoidable.

Then she asked, with admirable calm,

"Have you considered sending your suggestions to them?"

"I have."

"And?"

"I am trying to figure out the appropriate modus operandi."

She looked at me with the expression of a woman who had expected to marry a reasonably sensible corporate executive and had unexpectedly found herself cohabiting with a self-appointed Secretary of State.

"I expect they'll manage somehow."

Marriage, it turns out, is the ultimate reality check for a retired executive. It teaches you that no matter how elegantly you can dissect a transatlantic tariff structure, your authority entirely evaporates the moment you forget to pay the electricity bill.

I was a man who had outwitted life itself, perched comfortably on the highest cloud, only to be brought crashing down to earth by a missing utility payment.

The global economy would simply have to wait without me for a while. I had a rather more immediate ecosystem to pacify. Little did I realise that, as P. G. Wodehouse so memorably wrote in Very Good, Jeeves, "Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove."

Chronicles from Mehra World will continue next week.

If you enjoyed spending time with Arvind Mehra, I'd be delighted if you subscribed on Substack. New chronicles are delivered straight to your inbox.

Subscribe: rajeevbeotra.substack.com