Nikhil ✍🏼

Writing is how I think. Essays on character, history & the human animal. Reader first, writer always. Pink Floyd in the background.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

Presenting you with a thread on all my historical ebooks on Indian civilisation 🧵

I will keep adding more as I publish them.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

THE RIVER HAS NO PEAK

Envy makes sense only if you've accepted a world where one person's gain is another's loss. Most of us have — quietly, completely, without ever being asked.

We were raised in scarcity — not always material, but the scarcity of rank. Schools sorted us. Families compared us. The mind, trained early, learns to see every rising tide as a personal flood.

Comparison is the mechanism through which they control you. And comparison is inherently zero-sum — it is the desire for an upper hand. The pain is not that someone else succeeded. The pain is that you measured yourself against them and concluded you lost.

Life is not a mountain with a narrow peak where only a few can stand. That is a corporate illusion. Life is a river. It has no fixed shape, and therefore no scarcity of space that forces you to shrink yourself to fit.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

@thekaipullai my 2 cents on this.
link of the full essay - https://t.co/t4nSeRclOW

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

YOU ARE CONVENIENT, NOT IMPORTANT

Most of the chemistry you've felt with people in your life was not about you.

It was about the context. The college corridor, the office floor, the shared vacation.

Remove the setting, and the warmth cools within days.

Not because they are pretentious. Because you were never what they connected with — the role you played in that environment was.

This is the distinction nobody wants to sit with: convenience and importance feel identical from the inside.

You are easy to talk to, you serve a function, you represent something useful in their world.

That function generates warmth. Real warmth. But it is warmth aimed at the role, not at you.

Every relationship begins with how convenient you are to someone.

Nearly every relationship exists because you are serving a function in their life.

The chemistry doesn't mean you have a special bond.

It just means you are convenient to people.

Never mistake convenience for importance.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

i am tired of people saying they don't have time to read. or worse, they feel drowsy when they read.

not only their attention span is fucked, they also lack any awareness of what reading implies or what they are refusing.

a habit that can potentially transform your life, a habit that can offer you more perspectives than you can cultivate on your own shouldn't be dismissed as a hobby. it should be part of your life.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

INTEGRITY MATTERS

The most common complaint about the workplace is that people lack integrity. The most common reason integrity is lacking is that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first.

The justification sounds reasonable: if others aren't being truthful, why should I? It is not reasonable. It is moral compromise dressed as logic — and once you accept it, a slow hollowing begins that no amount of professional success can reverse.

Integrity is not a competitive disadvantage. The belief that ethics lead to poverty is a myth, and a lazy one.

Outcomes are tied to the choices you make and the value you create, not to how skillfully you avoid accountability. People who claim otherwise usually lack the capacity to produce value any other way.

The real case for integrity is not strategic. It is structural. A person who lives by clear values eventually stops having to force that strength — it becomes the architecture of who they are. The payoff is slow. The reputation built on it, however, can outlast a career. And even if it doesn't, you still lived as you were meant to live.

Ethical living appears foolish only to those who know no other way of living. That is the real tragedy.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

INTEGRITY MATTERS

The most common complaint about the workplace is that people lack integrity. The most common reason integrity is lacking is that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first.

The justification sounds reasonable: if others aren't being truthful, why should I? It is not reasonable. It is moral compromise dressed as logic — and once you accept it, a slow hollowing begins that no amount of professional success can reverse.

Integrity is not a competitive disadvantage. The belief that ethics lead to poverty is a myth, and a lazy one.

Outcomes are tied to the choices you make and the value you create, not to how skillfully you avoid accountability. People who claim otherwise usually lack the capacity to produce value any other way.

The real case for integrity is not strategic. It is structural. A person who lives by clear values eventually stops having to force that strength — it becomes the architecture of who they are. The payoff is slow. The reputation built on it, however, can outlast a career. And even if it doesn't, you still lived as you were meant to live.

Ethical living appears foolish only to those who know no other way of living. That is the real tragedy.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

WHAT LONELINESS DOES TO LOVE

Most relationships are not built on love. They are built on the terror of its absence — the loneliness, the re-entry into a world of strangers, the slow confrontation with the possibility that there is nothing inside you worth finding.

And so people stay. With whoever they have. Through incompatibility, through toxicity, through years of quiet suffocation. Because leaving requires something harder than endurance: it requires facing yourself alone.

If you never discover who you are — if you remain trapped in the fear of loneliness or in dread of facing the world — you will always be one tragedy away from a mental collapse.

Save yourself before that happens.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

CULTURAL AMNESIA

Thomas Macaulay is remembered for building a colonial education system. What he actually built was a generation that would feel ashamed of being Indian — and mistake that shame for sophistication.

The logic was clean. Replace indigenous institutions with British ones. Ensure the next generation measures itself against Western standards and finds itself wanting.

The result is not merely cultural distance; it is active self-contempt. A people who, denied the story of their own civilization's survival, adopt the colonial verdict on it as their own considered opinion.

A few generations later: people Indian only by skin and alienated from everything Indian in mind.

They cannot qualify as Western — the skin color forecloses it. They cannot be comfortable as Indian — the education made that feel like regression.

So they manage the wound by projecting contempt outward, onto the culture that survived a millennium of destruction to reach them.

Macaulay's real victory was not the clerks he produced. It was the amnesia he made inheritable.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

Thank you for sharing this. As a history student (for that's what I will always consider myself to be), I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to know your history and the history of your vicinity.

It immediately provides the context of our present times. It not only tells you where you came from but how you arrived at this particular juncture.

If you mix causations, material reasons, and remove distortion fields, you will come to very simple and methodical conclusions of how every conflict turns into movement; and whoever wins such movements eventually writes the history of that movement.

Coming to your post, this looks very, very similar to the narrative of Israel’s "atrocities" on Gaza civilians with convenient omission of what triggered those "atrocities”.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

Social media was supposed to distribute talent. It does the opposite now. Most people who want to be creators have no talent to distribute, so they distribute themselves.

The algorithm rewards skin over skill, sensationalism over sensibility, and the audience complies. Nobody even objects.

This is not only the platform's failure. It is the creator's too. The sequence is simple: corrupt the creator, corrupt the creation, corrupt the consumer. That chain is well underway.

Being mediocre is fine. Mediocrity is inert. It is part of the process. Work that goes nowhere corrupts no one. Iteration takes care of quality.

Corruption is different. It is content that bends the consumer toward something they should refuse.

As a creator, one must strive not to contribute to the rot of society. As much as you can. For as long as you can.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

@njissawrites I think the only way we can defeat the slop is by understanding what a genuinely good piece of art is. Most people fail because they have no idea what good looks like.

They are confusing ability with quality.

AI has provided the ability; the quality is still discretionary.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

Social media was supposed to distribute talent. It does the opposite now. Most people who want to be creators have no talent to distribute, so they distribute themselves.

The algorithm rewards skin over skill, sensationalism over sensibility, and the audience complies. Nobody even objects.

This is not only the platform's failure. It is the creator's too. The sequence is simple: corrupt the creator, corrupt the creation, corrupt the consumer. That chain is well underway.

Being mediocre is fine. Mediocrity is inert. It is part of the process. Work that goes nowhere corrupts no one. Iteration takes care of quality.

Corruption is different. It is content that bends the consumer toward something they should refuse.

As a creator, one must strive not to contribute to the rot of society. As much as you can. For as long as you can.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

REWARDED INTO CHAINS

The most dangerous slavery is the kind that pays well. When the incentives are good enough, the pat on the back frequent enough, you stop noticing the shackles. You call it a career. A life.

Most people hate mediocrity in the abstract. They hate it in other people. Few hate it in themselves with enough honesty to name it, and fewer still with enough courage to act on it.

The world is designed this way deliberately. Enough rewards for the slave, and he never develops the appetite for freedom. To break out requires hating your current arrangement so completely that losing everything feels preferable to staying put.

The ones who rule the world are often termed crazy at first.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

WHY THE OBNOXIOUS WIN?

The person you hate is probably doing something right.
Not morally. Not admirably. But their actions are aligned with outcomes in ways yours may not be. Intentions mean nothing. Nobody is rewarded for believing the right things in private.

What you read as arrogance often functions as confidence. What looks like recklessness is the absence of the paralysis you have dressed up as caution. They moved. You reasoned yourself out of moving.

Blind hatred grants temporary moral superiority. It produces no tangible returns. The better move is colder: observe what is working, extract it, discard the rest.

Most of our hatred stems from our own beliefs. Anyone who lives in contrast to those beliefs becomes a recipient of our contempt.

The moment you abandon the compulsion to hate and choose observation instead, you are likely to experience more luck — along with peace.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

WHY THE OBNOXIOUS WIN?

The person you hate is probably doing something right.
Not morally. Not admirably. But their actions are aligned with outcomes in ways yours may not be. Intentions mean nothing. Nobody is rewarded for believing the right things in private.

What you read as arrogance often functions as confidence. What looks like recklessness is the absence of the paralysis you have dressed up as caution. They moved. You reasoned yourself out of moving.

Blind hatred grants temporary moral superiority. It produces no tangible returns. The better move is colder: observe what is working, extract it, discard the rest.

Most of our hatred stems from our own beliefs. Anyone who lives in contrast to those beliefs becomes a recipient of our contempt.

The moment you abandon the compulsion to hate and choose observation instead, you are likely to experience more luck — along with peace.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

Religion has always progressed through crises. We live in a world where the biggest crisis is financial, and the progress of science and technology has answered a lot of questions that were unanswered back then.

Centuries ago, astronomy was a novel concept; now we don't care about it.

So the only way religion can progress is if it inculcates a universal brotherhood among the community, which unites all, or inculcates fear of apostasy in people that they get anxious by the thought of giving up on rituals.

islam ticks both these boxes, and that's why it's the only religion which has fanatics and not followers.

Nearly every other religion is facing a similar crisis of people not following through.

The only way Hinduism can prosper is through stories; we have such a rich legacy of beautiful philosophy wrapped in interesting stories. Movies of grandeur will make the generation feel proud of their heritage.

Teach them the history of the greats, and they will naturally follow. Saving culture is a serious work and requires effort spanning generations.

I am glad we are at least talking about it.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

Read slowly until every sentence achieves its highest comprehension level in your mind. What’s the point of speed reading? Why is there a rush to finish the book? Reading slowly improves comprehension, which leads to you remembering more. You can connect more dots because you remember more stuff.

And isn’t remembering what you read the whole point?

Isn’t that why we built a sophisticated note-taking system so we could remember?

Read according to the level of comprehension.

I do not see the point of speed reading. I think it’s BS.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

i used to do binge reading on weekends with my kindle. if you want to start, pick entertaining fiction like agatha christie or james patterson, or any writer of your choosing.

reading at a stretch is like activating a muscle; you eventually become better than today.

i read for 2–3 hours every single day because of my commute, and it’s not that hard. it also helps me become free from random thoughts.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

REWARDED INTO CHAINS

The most dangerous slavery is the kind that pays well. When the incentives are good enough, the pat on the back frequent enough, you stop noticing the shackles. You call it a career. A life.

Most people hate mediocrity in the abstract. They hate it in other people. Few hate it in themselves with enough honesty to name it, and fewer still with enough courage to act on it.

The world is designed this way deliberately. Enough rewards for the slave, and he never develops the appetite for freedom. To break out requires hating your current arrangement so completely that losing everything feels preferable to staying put.

The ones who rule the world are often termed crazy at first.

[Nikhil ✍🏼 @awriteway]

EQUALITY IS A TRAP

Equality sounds noble. What it does is normalize mediocrity at scale.

When protesters tear down statues of great men, they are not fighting injustice. They are destroying the evidence that some humans lived at a level they cannot reach. As long as signs of beauty and greatness remain, the mediocre can never feel secure.

This is why genius gets chided, attacked, and ultimately pressured to surrender. Not because it threatened anyone's rights. Because it exposed the gap.

In a world that celebrates mediocrity, an act of greatness is a sign of rebellion. Legacy implies past greatness. That's why mediocres don't have legacies.