I started options trading with just ₹70,000 while working in a private company. For the first two months, I made around ₹1.4 lakh and genuinely started believing I had found a second income source. Slowly I increased my quantity in Bank Nifty and Nifty weekly options. When losses started, I took a personal loan, then another loan, because I kept thinking one good expiry would bring everything back. By the time I finally stopped, my total loss was close to ₹18 lakh.
I had hidden everything from my family and was paying one EMI using another credit card. One afternoon, a recovery agent called my father because I had missed a payment. My father called me home and placed a notebook in front of me. He asked me to write every loan, every EMI and every person I owed money to. He helped me close the highest-interest debt from his savings, but the sentence he said still hurts: "I was saving this money to enjoy retirement, not to rescue your gambling."