“Sensex will touch 10 lakh points in my lifetime.”

livemint.com:

On 3 July, the BSE Sensex, India’s most famous stock market index, crossed 80,000 points for the first time during the course of a day’s trading. On 4 July, the Sensex closed above 80,000 points for the first time. When you have followed the Sensex for as long as I have, such occasions lead to random thoughts—or what in slightly technical terms can be referred to as the benefits of experience.

The Sensex crossing 80,000 points reminded me of a gentleman called Ved Prakash Chaturvedi. In mid-August 2007, Chaturvedi, who at that point of time was heading Tata Mutual Fund, said on TV that the Sensex would cross 100,000 points in “our lifetime". Now, this was one of those classic forecasts where the forecast of the Sensex achieving a big round number was made, without providing a date or the year it would get there.

Or as Ruchir Sharma writes in Breakout Nations: “The old rule of forecasting was to make as many forecasts as possible and publicize the ones you got right. The new rule is to forecast so far into the future that no one will know you got it wrong." And saying that something will happen in our lifetimes is exactly like that given that death remains the only truth in life. So, on 4 July, I remembered Mr Chaturvedi and put out a tweet where I asked as to why the business press hadn’t reached out to him and given him some publicity and dragged him out of his current anonymity.