For someone who has spent over three decades navigating market cycles, Shankar Sharma is unusually candid about what he sees as his biggest blind spot earlier in life — treating health as a background variable rather than a core asset.
Over the past few years, the veteran investor has been speaking openly about longevity science, preventive health and ageing. Sharma, speaking to NDTV Profit, insists this is not a sudden pivot. “For the last three or four years, off and on, I’ve been writing about my health journey,” he says.
Sharma’s focus has narrowed to a simpler equation: how many good years that wealth can actually buy, and whether Indians are asking that question early enough.
After the post-pandemic bull market, Sharma generated significant cash, and knew it’s time to take it off the table. That moment of surplus forced a reassessment of purpose. “None of this wealth is going to be of any use in the grave or in a hospital,” he says, adding, “Wealth became a means, rather than an end in itself, as it is for most people engaged in business and investing.”
Genetics, Wake-Up Calls And Hard Truths
Sharma’s interest in longevity is not abstract. His father died of a cardiac arrest at 52, and he mentions that cancer runs in the family. “When you enter your fifties, you become acutely aware of your genetics — at least you should,” he says. Despite being an athlete since school and staying fit through his business life, Sharma decided in his late fifties that baseline fitness was no longer enough.
The deaths of prominent business figures reinforced that thinking. Sharma points to the passing of Siddhartha Bhaiya and, earlier Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, as moments that should have served as wake-up calls for India’s professional class. “Most people believe it can’t happen to them,” he says. “But it does.”
In his view, Indians remain fixated on critical care rather than prevention — willing to spend heavily once something goes wrong, but reluctant to implement simple lifestyle changes when they are still healthy.
Treating The Body Like A Balance Sheet?
Sharma approaches health much the way he approached investing — through data, experimentation and constant recalibration. He reads research, tests interventions in small doses, tracks biomarkers and discards what does not deliver results.
That process has turned his home into what he calls a ‘human lab,’ equipped with devices such as hyperbaric oxygen chambers, infrared light panels, PEMF machines and saunas. Sharma says he has seen measurable improvements across cardiovascular, neurological and cellular markers.
At the same time, Sharma is clear that his approach sits at the far end of the spectrum. “I’m pushing for Olympic-level health,” he says. For most people, he acknowledges, simpler steps like moderate exercise, eating less, and cutting sugar can deliver the bulk of the benefits. “But people don’t do even that,” he adds.
Increasing The PE Ratio Of Life
As health has moved to the centre, Sharma’s definition of success has shifted. It is no longer about headline net worth, but about how effectively wealth can be used. Walking for hours without fatigue, flying long distances comfortably, or recovering quickly after indulgence are, for him, real-world markers of prosperity.
India’s fixation with net worth, he argues, often misses this distinction. “People chase an abstract number endlessly,” he says, “and sacrifice the ability to enjoy even a fraction of that wealth.”
In familiar market language, Sharma describes this as increasing the ‘PE ratio’ of life. Health discipline, he argues, improves the return one extracts from existing assets — allowing someone with less wealth but better health to live more fully than someone richer but unwell.
The Disclipline-Indulgence Tradeoff
Sharma admits he doesn’t have a neat explanation for why consistency in health is harder than consistency in money. His own solution is a structured trade-off: extreme discipline 80–90% of the time, conscious indulgence the rest.
Even while travelling, he says, he walks for hours daily, eats one meal a day and avoids alcohol — saving indulgence for occasions he chooses. “Everyone has only a limited number of indulgence bullets,” he says. “How you spend them determines the quality of your life.”
Where the Criticism Lies
Sharma’s framework is internally consistent, but it has also drawn debate. Apart from the common remarks of “Why is a market guy giving health advice?”, many claims around devices, telomere reversal and ‘measurable’ longevity gains also remain contested within mainstream medicine.
There is the question of accessibility. A home ‘human lab’ filled with specialised equipment and supplements is not realistic for most Indians. Critics argue that positioning elite biohacking as the benchmark risks overshadowing fundamentals like sleep, movement and nutrition.
While Sharma says he tracks biomarkers closely, experts caution that such markers can fluctuate for reasons unrelated to long-term health outcomes, and that correlation does not always imply causation.
Longevity science itself is still evolving, and some interventions sit at the edges of clinical consensus, making unsupervised replication potentially risky.
Sharma is careful to stress that he is not offering a template to copy. What he wants to provoke is a mindset shift.
. Read more on Markets by NDTV Profit.