Bhakts ?

 There are two types of people in the world.

• Emotional people
• Rational People

The emotional people decide everything based on their feelings.

An emotional person can’t differentiate between a person and his acts. Accordingly,

• If he likes a person, all his actions are good.
• If he hates a person, all his actions are bad.

A rational person on the other side differentiate the person and his actions. He can evaluate each action based on its merit. Accordingly,

• If an action is good, he appreciates the action
• If an action is bad, he criticizes the action

Most Indians are highly emotional and they have little or no ability to use their rational mind to judge every action of the government.

They already have formed the government either as good or evil based on their feelings about the leader.

Hence, they would either praise or criticize all actions of the government irrespective of merit.

Therefore you shall be branded either as a ‘bhakt’ (Nationalist) or ‘desh-drohi’ (Anti-national).

-Awdhesh Singh

There is a concept called....

Live by Principles Not Feelings

Are you like this guy ?

 I had a classmate who was finding it really hard to get a job.

We had just graduated at the time and he was looking for a job.

It was about a month since he started his search and one day I decided to call him up asking whether he got the job.

Me : “Hey man, how is your job hunt going? , any leads yet ?”.

Him: “Not yet, I am still struggling to find one”.

Me: “What exactly are you done so far? What companies have you applied for?”

Him: “I have setup profiles on a couple job portals, also applied for a couple jobs , waiting for their response but no response yet.”

Me trying to help : “Make sure you apply for a ton of jobs, most companies on job portal sites are fake and are setup by job agencies so make sure to …..”

He interrupts me mid-sentence.

Him: “Hey I got to go, Im out with my friends for a movie”.

Me: “Okay, bye”.

Upon disconnecting the call, I was like WTF ? This guy is jobless, calls him selves as someone who is struggling and is yet out with friends for a movie ?

He was not a local, he was living in a shared apartment, surviving on his parents money and yet was so relaxed.

A couple days later, I was in his locality for a client meeting after the meeting was over I decided to visit this classmate to see what was going on.

He was alone at the apartment as most of his flatmates went to work. He was laying on a mattress on the living room floor with his laptop watching a movie.

He still didn’t get a job and used to spend the entire day all alone at his room watching movies.

Upon asking about his job situation, he replied: “I was called for a couple interviews but was rejected by all of them.”

I asked: “So what’s your plan ahead?”

Him: ”I decided to enrol in XYZ institute to learn Java, they also have a good placement record, I can do the course for a couple months and also get a job”

Me: “Have you already paid the fee for the institute?”.

Him: “Yes, I did. The batches start next week”.

I knew that most institute courses are trash and the placements are even worse, However I decided not to tell him about it as he had already paid the fee and I didn’t want to discourage or demoralise him.

Him: ”Life is hard and unfair man, there is so much struggle.”

Me: “Yes it is, I know. But we got to work hard, skills is all that matter, maybe you should work on your skills and Im sure you will get the job”.

Him: “heck no, I don’t think skill matters, you see the guy “X” form our class, even he got placed despite of being so dumb. I am much better than him at all costs”

I nodded my head, even if I knew that X had far better skills than this dude.

After a while, I left for home.

A couple months later I come to know that he went back to his native place and was now working at his family farm.

In this entire duration of time, I had still other couple friend who had found a job off-campus and were doing quite well. Even I had started freelancing at was doing well. Whereas this guy “struggled” and yet didn’t get any job and had to go back.

Here are the reasons why:

He had an illusion that he was struggling, in reality however he was just being lazy. The real strugglers were my other friends who literally spent days applying for job, attending multiple interviews in a single day while this guy was spending his parents hard earned money watching movies.

He thought life was unfair only to him, even though his parents gave him enough time to find a job and settle. He could have been grateful for that and could have worked hard but instead he invested all his energy into the victim mentality.

He was entitled, he thought he deserves a job and companies are out here just to give people jobs. Rather than being responsible for his own actions and his future, he laid his future in hands of an institute which promised him a job.

He never saw a fault in himself, but always thought others were wrong. Had he focused on his own shortcomings analysing why he was rejected in an interview, and had worked on it, he would have easily managed to get a job.

So to answer the question:

Why do some people couldn't achieve much success, they should have achieved, despite putting effort and hard work?

Hard work is a relative term.

I know a lot of people who think they “work hard” but in reality they just have an illusion of working hard.

Yes, luck plays an important role. But the doors of luck only open up when you work hard.

Also, hard work is not just about doing manual labour and just completing a task at hand.

Hard work also involves self analysis, taking hard and life changing decisions, and being critical of yourselves.

-Saurav Sharma

Do this before any goal...

Grit............

Financial Failure ?

 I see broadly 3 characteristics that differentiate success and failure from a financial sense:

1. Not investing enough: You could ask how can a poor “invest”. There are a lot of things besides money. I see so many “poor” people unable to invest time or money in learning/ know-how, connections/relationships, etc. For instance, many IT workers whose whole work is based on knowledge don’t spend anything to keep upgrading the knowledge (with books, courses) and then complain when their company lays off in the middle of their career.
2. Not thinking for a long-enough period: Poor people often cannot afford to think long and thus make very expensive choices with money. Rich has a longer horizon to plan.
3. Getting into bad debt: When successful people get into debt it is for leverage — to multiply their power. It is always for a fast-growing asset. When poor people get into debt it is for a non-asset or a fast depreciating one. I see so many young people in my company and elsewhere who buy expensive phones, car, bikes on EMI. That is a road to ruin.

-Balaji Viswanathan

Product Market Fit

Why are we poor and others rich ?

Rich people work hard or is it just luck ?

Wealth creation is rarely about individual effort alone or pure luck—it's typically about intergenerational advantage. It is not "hard work vs. luck". It is more about how a family can work in tandem to build an advantage over multiple generations. Rich people pass on wealth, wisdom and connections to the next generations, while poor people don’t pass much.

We live in an instant-everything world where we assume that wealth is built in a few years. It doesn’t happen that way. Advantage of any kind is built over generations often taking a century or more. The ones who have the patience to think this and plan for not just themselves but help their kids and grandkids tend to be successful.

The Multi-Generational Path to Wealth

A typical wealthy family today often traces back 3-4 generations:

1. The great-grandfather might have started with nothing, working himself to exhaustion but prioritizing education for his children
2. The grandfather could secure stable employment, moving the family away from starvation
3. The father, with better education, could take calculated risks and build connections
4. The current generation inherits not just financial capital, but social capital, business networks, and opportunities

This pattern appears consistently across successful families. Consider these examples:

• The Tata family built their empire over two centuries, starting with trade during colonial times
• Bill Gates benefited from his mother's IBM connections
• Elon Musk's father (who owned mining operations) provided early advantages
• Even historical figures like Mahatma Gandhi benefited from educational privileges most Indians couldn't access

Family Stability as Economic Advantage

The primary way to build the multigeneration advantage is at the family level. Poor families often have absentee parents, often drunkard husbands. My father used to work in rural development activities of his bank when I was a kid and as I visited the families of poor. The thing that always struck me was how different the fathers were from those in successful families. If the fathers think in terms of multiple generations of slowly building an advantage, the family gets a substantial boost.

Research shows a growing "marriage divide" that reinforces wealth disparities:

• Middle and upper-class Americans [and Indians] have higher marriage rates and more stable families
• Working-class and poor Americans experience higher rates of family instability and single parenthood
• This divide didn't exist before the 1970s but has grown significantly since

The Marriage Divide: How and Why Working-Class Families Are More Fragile Today

Editor’s Note: This research brief is an edited version of a research brief prepared for the Opportunity America-AEI-Brookings Working-Class Group. Go here to read or download the full brief. When it comes to marriage and family life, America is increasingly divided. College-educated and more affluent Americans enjoy relatively strong and stable marriages and the economic and social benefits that flow from such marriages. By contrast, not just poor but also working-class Americans face rising rates of family instability, single parenthood, and life-long singleness. Their families are increasingly fragile and poor and working-class Americans pay a serious economic, social, and psychological price for the fragility of their families. 1 The Fragility of Working-Class Marriages and Families Before the 1970s, there were not large class divides in American family life. The vast majority of Americans got and stayed married, and most children lived in stable, two-parent families. 2 But since the 1960s, the United States has witnessed an emerging substantial marriage divide by class. First, poor Americans became markedly less likely to get and stay married. Then, starting in the 1980s, working-class Americans became less likely to get and stay married. 3 The current state of marriage and family life and the class divisions that mark America’s families can be seen by looking at contemporary trends in marriage, cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, divorce, children’s family structure, and marital quality. One of the most dramatic indicators of the marriage divide in America is the share of adults age 18–55 who are married. Figure 1 indicates that a majority of middle- and upper-class Americans are married, whereas only a minority of working-class Americans are married. This stands in marked contrast to the 1970s, when there were virtually no class divides in the share of adults married, and a majority of adults across the class spectrum were married. 4 At the same time, Figure 1 indicates that working-class Americans fall almost halfway between poor and middle- and upper-class Americans when it comes to the share who are married.* When it comes to coupling, poor and working-class Americans are more likely to substitute cohabitation for marriage. Figure 2 shows that poor Americans are almost three times more likely to cohabit, and working-class Americans are twice as likely to cohabit, compared with their middle- and upper-class peers age 18–55. Taken together, these figures suggest that lower- income and less-educated Americans are more likely to be living outside of a partnership. Specifically, about six in 10 poor Americans are single, about five in 10 working-class Americans are single, and about four in 10 middle- and upper-class Americans are single. However, when it comes to another fundamental feature of family life—childbearing—working-class and especially poor women are more likely to have children than their middle- and upper-class peers (see Fi

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-marriage-divide-how-and-why-working-class-families-are-more-fragile-today

Two-parent households provide substantial advantages:

• Shared parenting responsibilities reduce exhaustion
• Combined resources and focused attention benefit children's development
• Long-term planning becomes more feasible with dual support

The Cooperative Advantage of Wealth

Rich people also tend to do work in a group settings better. Poor communities are often scattered in terms of their work and far more prone to infighting. This allows the rich to support each others children in a quid pro quo arrangement as they all want similiar things. Since they all think long term in terms of advantage, they can work in cooperative settings better.

Wealthy communities demonstrate patterns that reinforce advantages:

• Better ability to work cooperatively toward shared long-term goals
• Mutual support networks that benefit each other's children
• Common values around education, career development, and wealth building

Meanwhile, poverty often forces short-term thinking that makes cooperation more difficult:

• Immediate needs take priority over long-term planning
• Diverse urgent priorities make community alignment challenging
• Limited resources can intensify competition rather than cooperation

This creates a middle-class squeeze where upward mobility becomes increasingly difficult—caught between established wealth networks above and fragmented support systems below.

The question isn't simply about who works harder. It's about understanding how advantage accumulates across generations, creating systems where some people's work yields far greater returns than others in similar or even more demanding roles.

As a reader you could point to exceptions about families with hardworking parents but poor and vice versa. It does happen, but it doesn’t last very long. In a couple of generations, the hardworking family eventually gets to the wealthy track while the ones that are throwing away their advantages will get back to poverty.

-Balaji Viswanathan

Luck or Hardwork ?

 

If you are jobless, you don’t really have.....

If you are jobless, you don’t really have the luxury of choice. In tough times, even a peon’s job would be acceptable. So, if you are unemployed, SSC CGL is not a bad choice for you.

However, if you have the capability to clear UPSC or equivalent exams, earn ₹1.5–2 lakh per month in the corporate sector, or have the mindset and dedication to run your own business, then you might not be happy after joining SSC CGL. You may keep thinking that you could have done something better but didn’t.

However, SSC CGL is not a bad choice overall. But if you have exceptional skills and potential, aim for something more rewarding. Let SSC CGL be an option for those who are above average or average.

-Nitesh Sharma, Superintendent at Central Board of Excise and Customs

Advice is like a bitter medicine

Optimize....

Love and Relationships

 Movies teach something very wrong on “Love and relationships “ especially Bollywood movies.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend . He was in a early stage relationship with a girl and then the girl changed her mind. My Friend has been deeply affected by this (some people are sensitive ). you can change the gender as well . There are so many such stories of our youth .

Our movies like Veer Zara , Kal Ho na Ho Or Aashiqui series or any romantic story you see they talk about Pure and unconditional love . Our youths follow movies religiously and yes, they have deep impact on our values while growing up .

I felt this has destroyed the lives of many .

Love unconditionally, but to those who deserve

Trust , but verify them

if someone wants to go, let them. If you hold back there will be many negative repulsions. Let them explore. It may happen that they may come back to you after failing . But let them try

When someone does not reciprocate , chill out . Be good friends. But expect nothing . Have a good life outside it . Remember nothing is worth your happiness

Do not be artificial, but be practical

There is nothing such as perfect person or perfect couple as people portrayed in social media. Love lies with in you . When your intention is clear, you will find it

Abinash Mishra , IAS , IIT KGP

Principles of Natural Justice

 Dale Carnegie in his book ‘How to win friends and influence people” narrates an interesting story.

On May 7, 1931, the notorious killer “Two Gun” Crowley was hunted down and captured. He was one of the most dangerous killers in New York.

Once, he was sitting in a car with his girlfriend when a policeman walked up and asked for his license. Without a word, Crowley drew his gun and shot the man.

But when Crowley was captured, police found a note in which he wrote: "Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one—one that would do nobody any harm."

Crowley was sentenced to the electric chair.

When he arrived at the death house in Sing Sing, did he say, "This is what I get for killing people"?

No, he said, "This is what I get for defending myself."

The point of the story is this: "Two Gun" Crowley didn't blame himself for anything.

When you don’t care about others’ opinions and seek your own validation for your actions, you tend to justify your actions, however horrible they may be.

Hence, if you wish to know the truth, you must be fair in your judgment.

To arrive at a fair judgment, you must follow the principle of natural justice.

The three core principles of natural justice are:

1. No one should judge their own case (Nemo Judex in Causa Sua),
2. Everyone has the right to be heard (Audi Alteram Partem),
3. Decisions should be explained (Reasoned Decisions)

Hence, if you want an honest assessment of your actions, you must not be the judge of your actions and hear the point of view of other people as well, and then you must try to find out the truth, not emotionally, but through reason and logic, weighing all the opinions.

-Awdhesh Singh

Happiness

Imagine that you have gone to withdraw cash from a bank ATM.

You insert your card in the slot and then enter ₹10,000 for withdrawal.

Would you get the cash?

The answer to this question depends whether or not you have sufficient balance in your bank account.

• If you have deposited ₹10,000 or more in your bank account, you would get the cash.
• If you have not deposited ₹10,000, the ATM shall show you ‘insufficient balance’ and won’t give you any money.

The rule of the bank is that you have to deposit the money before you withdraw it.

In the same way, there is one rule in life.

You have to earn you happiness, before you can enjoy happiness.

And earning happiness is always painful.

You have to first suffer unhappiness before you are entitled to enjoy life.

• You have to slog for months before examination to get good marks and enjoy your result.
• You have to practice for several years painfully to get great performance in sports in the field and enjoy the accolades of the world and win the medal.
• You have to work hard for several years and take risks in life to acquire wealth and become rich.

You have to pass through tough times and suffer failures several times before you can enjoy your success.

If you are not willing to face tough times in life, you can’t enjoy happiness because only through sufferings, we earn our happiness.

Hence, when tough times comes, face it boldly, because when you would reach to the other side of tough time, you shall be welcomed by the happiness because you would have earned your enjoyment by facing the tough time boldly.

Don’t blame the bank if it refuses to withdraw cash from your account due to your inability to make sufficient deposit in your account.

Don’t blame the world, if it refuses to let you enjoy your life because you refused to suffer pain in life.

-Awdhesh Singh

Why there is so much pain in your life?

Optimal Forager Behaviour

Source of picture: Google Images

Once the rain is over, an umbrella becomes a burden to everyone

 There is a famous saying, "Once the rain is over, an umbrella becomes a burden to everyone.”

The bitter fact of life is that in our world, loyalty ends when benefits stop.

The only reason you should keep an umbrella is that the rain will not be over forever, and the umbrella will be helpful in the future.

However, if the umbrella becomes too old, broken and has many holes in it, it would surely be discarded forever,

Most human relationships are reciprocal in nature, and most people change their behaviour when you are no longer useful to them.

If you wish to live with self-respect and dignity, you must ensure that you remain useful throughout your life.

It is also important to understand that one day, you will become too old and lose all your utility to society.

In such a situation, the only thing that can make you useful is your savings and assets.

If you have money, your utility will never be over and there will always be a few people to help and serve you.

While there are certainly some good people who remember what you have done for them and would always be loyal to you, however, in reality, loyalty is tested only when you are in a difficult or hopeless situation, and if you are discarded at that time, you will have nowhere to go.

Hence, it is better to keep a backup option in the form of wealth, in case your loved ones and friends discard you at the time of your need.

Clare Boothe Luce wisely said, “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable.”

-Awdhesh Singh

Salary in IT after 20 years

Are you Fit to earn much ?