Nikhil's Blog

Everybody likes attention. We do all sorts of things to make the world pay attention to our existence. We forget to focus on the quality of attention we are attracting. This is especially true on social media. When you are stripping clothes, dancing naked, what kind of people do you think you will bring to your profile? Sure, you will have thousands of followers, but what kind of followers? What kind of things will they expect from you? I am being extreme, but you cannot expect warmth from…

Everybody likes ambition until they have to face an ambitious person in real life. When they have to face that partner who would choose their ambition over them, that’s when the test of every relationship begins. Ambition is acceptable in men but not in women. Because no matter how far we think we have come in our evolution, in our civilizational ethics, in our understanding of equality, we still feel that without women, we are incomplete. And so we assign them the duty of completing us. Of…

It’s hard to acknowledge intelligence in someone, especially when that intelligence is greater than yours. The person who does that deserves as much respect as the intelligent person being admired. Because to admire someone, you need dual awareness: one of your own strengths and where you lack, and another of the superiority of the other person. Most people lack every kind of awareness. They can at least acknowledge their own shortcomings, but to acknowledge someone else’s superiority is nigh…

Political ideologies can make you stupid. I am not here to target the right or the left of the political spectrum. I am speaking as someone who has been on both sides of the seesaw. The fight is never really about the truth, and I think both sides are willing to acknowledge at least that much. The whole point of an ideological battle is groupthink. You believe in certain things, so you gradually start believing in things that are somewhat connected to your original beliefs. You find people who…

Your romantic obsession is a message that could be interpreted in more ways than you think. When you are obsessed with a person, you think that person has connected deeply with you. They have managed to touch strings in your heart that nobody could before. You make that person special in your mind by engaging in mindless scenarios and imaginary conversations. You make that person bigger than what they are, different from who they appeared to be. You start to live with that personality in your…

Being competitive has its advantages. You always fight hard, you never give up, and you always give more than you think you are capable of. But competitiveness is useful when the battle is on equal ground. Like in sport, where you know the other player is equally capable, so the only difference you can bring is your intensity. That sometimes creates the difference. The same competitiveness becomes useless when the battle is not on equal ground. When the fight isn’t about the finish line, when…

What you choose to react to says a lot about you. If you train yourself to observe what people choose to react to, you will learn a lot about them. The intensity of their reaction is proportional to how much something bothered them. There’s always more than meets the eye. Someone’s harsh reaction, harsher than the situation demanded, is never just about that incident. It is a trigger. That incident has triggered something in them. Either they were already frustrated and the incident gave them…

It’s nearly impossible to do everything at once. We know this truth, yet every time, we make the same mistake of thinking we can actually handle more things at once. We don’t want to leave anything aside, not even for a few months. Our mind is designed for focused work. There are studies and literature on the effectiveness of focused work, and we know that intuitively too. We have experienced the effects of focused work. The problem isn’t that we don’t know the effects. The problem is what…

AI has turned everyone into a product manager. You can think of an idea and bring it to life at a speed that was unheard of in the past. Never before in the entire history of human beings have we been able to manifest what we imagined and desired with such immediacy. This is a tremendous leap that we have taken, yet we have collectively gone numb to the scale of our own achievement. We are more fearful of what we have built. There are protests to stop it because we are afraid it will take away…

Many a times you are fighting with demons in your mind that only exists in your mind and nowhere else. You are fighting against the perceived slights, against people who were indifferent to you, who didn’t support you, who belittled you, who underestimated you. Your mind relives all those sessions again and again until you haven’t settled score with every one of those people. But here’s the problem with this approach. You cannot fight what you cannot see. To wage a war you need two people to…

There is a problem that I have struggled with for years now: comparing someone’s final version with my first draft. The cycle is endless, and even though I know the solution to this problem, it never goes away. Maybe I love feeling inferior, or maybe it’s impostor syndrome that makes me feel that I am not good enough. No matter how much I create, I feel I haven’t done enough. This is specific to writing. In other areas of life, I get excited by even the smallest of my achievements, but when it…

Young men these days are so disheartened by the world that they have given up all hope. Every time you talk to them, they cite economic statistics, their struggles, their traumas, and how they have been systematically exploited. Of course, there is truth to that. But what do you expect from the world, an apology? The only way they have chosen to respond is by drowning themselves in addiction and women. The nihilism is not helping, but it is at least giving them a convenient excuse to do what…

There are days when getting out of bed feels harder. Every step feels like too much. There is an ache in the body that cannot be explained away as mere exhaustion because it is too much, everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time. There is an ache, but there is no single source. There is a profound dullness within you that you do not know how to shake. Melancholy is a prolonged sadness. A kind of grief that settles within you. Unlike most kinds of sadness, this one does not disappear after…

What a pathetic state to be in, to want someone. To need someone. To need warmth. To need love. I write love as though I am writing a foreign word, a foreign curse, like a language I am trying to learn while knowing I can never become fluent in it. To constantly need someone to understand you is its own kind of prison, and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy. We all want someone to dig deeper into who we are, to learn about us, to know us better than we could ever tell them ourselves. We…

As I began understanding myself better, I realised that my understanding of the world is inverted. I understand almost everything through its absence rather than its presence. If you ask me what kind of furniture you should buy for your house, my mind doesn't imagine the perfect piece of furniture. Instead, it imagines a house without any furniture and concludes that anything would be better than nothing. I don't picture what would look beautiful. I simply recognise that furniture ought to…

Everything in this world has an expiry date. Literally everything you see has a mechanism through which it dies, and you know that in advance. Thousands of years ago, Hindu scriptures described the world as cyclical. Everything that has been created will eventually come to an end. Creation and destruction are inseparably linked, each giving rise to the other in an endless cycle. Some things take longer to die, while others perish early. If you extend that logic and apply it to human beings, you…

The most common complaint between couples is that the attention is no longer the same as it used to be. One person becomes more focused on work than on their personal relationships. And you wonder why the other person feels this way because, from your perspective, you have been talking to them, laughing with them, and spending time together just as you always have. But beneath the surface, things have changed in ways you forget to notice. Everything good that happens between two people happens…

If you are someone who has often been told that you are too nice to people, that you tolerate far more than you should, you have probably found yourself wondering whether you should finally lash out or continue being the person you are. You are conflicted because, deep down, you know you want to react, yet you also worry about coming across as impolite or crude. You do not want to hurt others, so you end up hurting yourself, which only breeds further frustration. The problem with being nice is…

Most people are wired to see imperfections in themselves. Your confidence can fall so low that you only see beauty in others and never in yourself. Your observations become so acute that you spot every tiny imperfection: how you look, which part of your body is oddly shaped, how you speak, where you falter, and how embarrassing you think you are in front of others. When someone points out that you are focusing too much on your imperfections, you cannot process it because, to you, it's true. You…

Everybody wants stability in a relationship, which is a practical choice. Everybody wants peace in the end. They want a household free of fights and quarrels, an intuitive understanding, and essentially a life without any challenges. But such a partner and such a life also come with their own tradeoffs. Imagine living a life where your heart never skips a beat. The passion never materialises because there's no catalyst for it to surface. Both people are so consumed by their own routines that…

There are people in your life who are miserable no matter what happens to them. Regardless of how their life unfolds, they will always find something to be upset about. This isn't about chronic complaining itself, though that's the only visible sign of it, it's what makes someone a chronic complainer underneath. Everybody goes through struggles in life. Some are internal, where you're wrestling with your own psychology, trying to understand yourself better, trying to correct behavioural quirks.…

Smoking is one of those habits I buried, but it refuses to stay buried. I was a teetotaler for most of my life until I got a taste of a cigarette and liked it. Before I could even register what was happening, I had moved on to a pack a day, until it got so bad that I was reaching for a cigarette the moment I woke up. I would wake up in the evening and begin my day with a cigarette, until one day, standing on a balcony, I noticed a young kid watching me smoke. I realized I might be inspiring…

A lot of the time, you feel that your excitement about a particular topic or piece of conversation isn't being reciprocated in kind. You realise the other person isn't as interested as you thought they'd be. They're listening to what you're saying out of courtesy, not attention. They won't remember most of the conversation by the time you circle back to it. This feeling deflates us, because we assume the other person isn't interested in us. We forget that most of the information we share is out…

The mark of an intelligent person is how comfortably he handles contrarian views, and more importantly, how well he handles dissent. Nobody is perfect, no argument is airtight, no approach is the right approach, so there is always room for dissent. There will always be people who have something to say about what you do. Some call it feedback, some call it dissent, some call it jealousy. Regardless of how you choose to frame it, having people voice their dissatisfaction about your conduct or…

When you're with someone for a long time, whether through a relationship or marriage, it's natural to feel saturated, bored, even unsatisfied. Every issue takes on outsized proportions, every minor argument spirals out of control, and before you know it, even talking to them starts to feel difficult. Sure, you course-correct, but this remains a recurring theme in every relationship. This continues for as long as you live, regardless of who you're with. But when you meet someone new, when you're…

Remember when your heart was broken and you wanted her to tell you, just once, why she left you? Why she cheated on you? Why she didn't tell you this before, when there was still time? You said you wanted closure, but there's no such thing as a perfect closure. There's no perfect ending. That notion of a clean conclusion is a myth propagated by stories and movies. They propagate this myth because they run on a schedule. They have to wrap things up by steering you toward a logical conclusion. So…

When you enter university and watch your seniors at their farewell, you hear them dishing out the best advice on how to enjoy college life. They tell you these are your best years, that you'll never get them back, so you should live them fully. But you, having just started, never get it. You resort to bickering over trivial issues. You wait to be rid of college life so you can enter adult life and start making money. Until it's your turn at the farewell, and you realise you're dispensing the…

Everybody is good at something they practice unknowingly, something that comes naturally to them or emerges from habits built subconsciously. You don't realise how good you've become until you're placed in an environment that directly tests it. This is also why most people carry that lack of self worth, thinking they aren't good enough, because they've been measuring themselves against the wrong standard. But when you're in an environment where your particular skillset is valued, you naturally…

Every person goes through the feeling of being left alone. Of being abandoned. When they try to connect with someone and that person doesn't react with the same intensity. When you sent that text and it's been an hour and she hasn't responded. Worse, you saw her posting an Instagram story, so she clearly has her phone in hand but hasn't prioritised your message. That feeling in your stomach is called abandonment. We fear rejection because we don't want to be left alone. Rejection reminds us…

A lot of people in long-term relationships become unhappy after a while. They say it's normal. That love eventually fades. They begin to believe love is only ever early infatuation or attraction, and once that fades, the mundanities of life take over. Then the conflict begins. But they all agree that there should be respect between two people to sustain the relationship. This is where they draw the line. This all sounds healthy and intellectual. It is not. It is a defeatist mindset born out of…