The person
behind the brand.

This brand did not start with a business plan. It started with years of watching everyone around me — including myself — get finance advice from everywhere, and clarity from nowhere.

Open any feed today and everyone is a finance guru. Reels telling you which fund to buy, which one to avoid, how to retire by thirty-five. Most of it sounds confident. Very little of it comes from someone who has actually lived through a market that took their money and didn't hand it back on schedule.

I have. And I am not writing any of this from a textbook.

2008 taught me the first lesson, and it taught it hard. I lost real money — not a paper loss I could explain away to myself, a loss I felt every month after. I went conservative. Fixed deposits, safety, nothing that could hurt me again. That lasted for years.

In 2016 I tried again — cautiously, moderate risk, mostly leaning on what my bankers told me to do. It felt responsible. What it actually meant was that I still hadn't learned anything myself. I was outsourcing my confidence to someone else's advice.

Then Covid happened, and it broke something open in me — twice, in two different ways.

I started studying properly, from the ground up — markets, macro and micro economics, taxation, diversification, how global events actually move Indian portfolios. Not headlines. The mechanics underneath them.

I built my own approach after that. Not because a book told me to, but because I had finally done the work myself. And the strange thing is — the same kind of crash that had scared me into safety in 2008 made me more resilient the second time. More confident. More willing to take a calculated risk instead of no risk at all. I rebuilt from that fifty percent. I re-analysed everything I owned. For the first time, I was actually in control of my own money — not my banker, not a guru, me.

That is the whole point of this brand. Not the number I eventually got back to. The fact that I got there by understanding my own behaviour with money — not by finding a better tip.

That is the whole reason ChaturvsMauj exists as India's first behavioural finance company. Every other finance company in this country leads with a product — a fund, a policy, a stock tip. We lead with your behaviour, because that is the part that actually decides whether any of it works for you.

There is one more thing I believe deeply, and it shapes everything this brand will ever say to you.

No product is right or wrong. Not stocks, not fixed deposits, not ULIPs, not term insurance, not annuities, not NPS, not senior citizen savings schemes. Every single one of them exists because it works for someone, in some situation, for some reason. The question was never which one is the best. The question is always — what do you need, when do you need it, and why, and does that align with your risk, your return, your retirement, and inflation quietly working against all three.

That is the opposite of what most financial content does. Most of it hands you a straight-line answer — this gives more return than that, so buy this. We will not do that here. We are not in the business of telling you a product is great because a number is bigger. We are in the business of working on you — your needs, your desires, what you can actually stomach when the market falls, because that is what your risk appetite really is. Return is only half of the equation. The other half — the one most finance gurus skip past entirely — is security. How much of this can you afford to lose, and how much of it simply needs to be safe. And even "safe" has a hidden cost almost nobody accounts for — inflation, quietly eating away at money that feels completely protected. We will walk you through all of it, not just the exciting parts.

And taxation sits inside all of this too, not outside it. The right product, at the right time, for the right reason, still has to make sense after tax. That is the real mix — risk, return, retirement, tax, and inflation, together, not one of them shouting over the others.

I will tell you honestly why I think this way. Somewhere long ago, I read that only two to three percent of people ever actually make real money — in the market, or anywhere else. My answer to that has never changed — even if it is two to three percent, I want to be one of them. And that means staying open to everything available to get there, including gold and silver.

I come from a goldsmith family. Diversification was not a concept I learned from a finance course — I learned it from my great-grandfather, without even realising it at the time. Buying a gold or silver coin every festival. Jewellery on every occasion that called for it. It was tradition to me before it was strategy. Today it is more structured, more deliberate, and I understand exactly why it worked all along.

Everything you see in the market exists because it works — for someone, somewhere. Our job is not to rank them for you. It is to show you how a specific one will work for you, and when.

If you ask me today whether I am Chatur or Mauj — I am both, depending on what the moment needs. When it is time to structure the money, check the allocation, think about tax — that is Chatur. When it is time to actually enjoy what the money was for — that is Mauj. Neither one gets to win permanently. Both have to show up, at the right moment.

I have spent close to three decades in technology, an MBA in finance and marketing, and I am currently working through my CFA while building deep in AI and blockchain in finance. I have designed financial systems and architecture for companies with entire teams of analysts behind them. I had never built anything like this before — a brand, a voice, content people actually stop and read — until Chatur vs Mauj. I am learning that part in public too, with the same tools everyone else has.

If your income is small, the finance world mostly ignores you, or quietly makes you feel like investing is for later, for someone else, for when you "have enough." I don't believe that. I believe your behaviour towards money — not the size of your salary — decides whether you build something or stay stuck. That is not a theory for me. I lived the version where I had real money and still made the wrong calls with it. Behaviour is the variable that matters at every income level, not just the higher ones.

This was never about me making more money. I have spent my career building systems for companies. This one, I am building for people — for the version of me that needed this ten years ago, and for anyone reading this who needs it right now.

I want you to feel one thing on this site — that this is an honest effort. Not polished for an algorithm, not written to sell you something. Written because I had to learn to take my own money seriously, the hard way, and I would genuinely rather you didn't have to learn it the same way.

This is going to take years. The content, the blog, the tools, the community, the magazine — everything we are building here is a long game, and we know that going in.

We are not going anywhere.