The Rudest Book Ever

by Shwetabh Gangwar

I disagree because my feelings don’t like it.

Factual truths means they are incontestable to those who believe them, and they most probably will die by them.

Familiarity, although safe, does not guarantee soundness.

One can become a parent because the guy forgot to pull out, or the girl—out of some ancient, primitive urge—commanded the guy to not pull out, or he believed he had pulled out but the result said otherwise. People have babies because they like babies, or because they have recently been feeling a sense of incompleteness, or because they hope it will make their lives purposeful again. People have babies because they have reached the age society has deemed right to have a baby. People have babies because it appears to be a viable strategy to save their marriage, or because one of the partners wants to have a baby, and the other complies. People have babies so the baby can grow up to fulfil the unfulfilled dreams of either of the parents.

Ideally speaking, there should be a strategy.

A baby is a cute little thing that will change our lives, well, that is not good enough.

accept existential insignificance,

Aware of when to let the child get hurt and when to intervene.

Status is a socially engineered identity that tends to replace the individual identity.

Learning of any kind that involves zero investment of your thinking produces only imitation.

In most cases, older people are children who have aged. Stop attaching maturity, wisdom, enlightenment to ageing. He is old, hence he must be wise is one of the stupidest notions we take for granted.

There is love, but it is shown in demands of accomplishments and excellence.

I felt it when I achieved that.

‘That’, is anything that created a considerable amount of self-belief in you, and made you believe for the first time that you are capable.

Specialness is the badge of realisation you earn.

Any achievement dictates you have created or mastered something.

You need to make it completely clear in your mind that others recognising you, giving you attention, a moment of their time, is not you being treated as somebody special.

You translate that into specialness because you hardly ever feel good about yourself.

This means you have never consciously devised a way to make yourself feel better. It’s the burden of feeling inadequate in your mind that makes normal acts of kindness from others seem like special acts, which they are not. Guys say, ‘You are special’, to girls they are trying to have sex with. The point is, if you rely on others to feel special, ...

Because whatever I do impacts the world, I shall and must become better, so I can impact the world for the better.

Those who hold prizes, positions and power are sources to learn from—and nothing else. You know nothing about their lives except for their abilities. Admire the fact that they have those abilities, and leave it at that.

It is because we know we aren’t special in our own eyes, that we at least want to be told by others that we are in theirs.

Specialness then becomes a collection of skills, and feeling special is the sensation felt on upgrading in life after having mastered a skill.

You are the only one invested in what becomes of you.

You know a lot of sensible things, but the reason why you don’t apply them is because you don’t understand them.

To understand something, it must come from the reasoning of your own mind.

Knowledge can be borrowed, but you can’t borro...

Once you reach a conclusion derived from your thinking, it is c...

It is neither a fully positive nor negative term.

Lastly, ‘weird’ has the same sense of mystery that ‘complicated’ does, but without that wall of impossible penetration.

It allows for doubt to fill the space instead of assumptions from ego or hurt.

Let it go, man, people are weird; you don’t have to understand them, nor blame anyone.

Always remember: your job is not to understand people, but to understand and take care of yourself.

For one, having a perception to fall back on is better than having no perception at all, and much better than having delusional perceptions.

Your perception of something creates expectations from them.

What you have is impressions of them, first impressions to be precise, which is debatable data, or unreliable data, to say the least.

They may seem this way, but I don’t fucking know.

BECOME MORE LOGICAL, LESS EMOTIONAL

I am not going to expect anything from them. I know practically nothing about their life. I am going to observe and wait for real data to show up.

Waiting means that you allow yourself time to calm down from your initial excitement.

Real data is any pattern of behaviour and thought that backs a person’s actions, not words.

Observe whether it reflects in their choices as well.

Real data is found in the choices they make, not what they say they would like to make.

Fuck what they would like to do, focus on what people actually do.

I am not going to judge them based on rumours, nor am I going to buy into the hype around them. I simply don’t know.

there is only one route to gaining your trust and coming into your life—by being nice to you and making you feel good.

So screw the first impression no matter what they do professionally.

You stick to one place. You don’t change your job, as if you have married the workplace.

Your mind looks only for safe options now, and your part-time job is to scare other people into looking at the world like you do.

Mediocrity is safe.