Why I Read – and my top 3 books of 2025

Why is it that one should read? Or for that matter, why should one read anything? For starters, I think basic reading is an operational necessity if one needs to function in this world. However, even that isn’t so easy to come by for many.

The 2024 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) suggests that almost one-third of Class 8 students in India can’t read at the expected level. I assume, however, that everyone who can read this article – or who will ever read it – has this basic ability to read.

My quest goes further. It is to understand why do we choose to read something that goes beyond our basic day-to-day functioning?

I think I have found my answer.

The reason I read is because I have this innate curiosity to learn about the world as accurately I can and to understand my place in it. I also read to be conscious. As Jeff Hawkins says, “Consciousness is the moment-to-moment memories of our actions and thoughts”. In a way, then, I read to be alive and to incessantly update my understanding of myself and the world.

Where it began for me

Like most things in life, the genesis of anything meaningful (or traumatic) can be traced back to our childhood. When I look back at my own childhood, I feel that I have always had a love for reading, but it was rather undiscovered.

In India, reading is more about the outcome – performing well on a test or getting through a job – instead of a process of enjoyment, discovery, or curiosity.

I first discovered reading as a process that I loved when I read and re-read Julius Caesar by Shakespeare in Grade 9. That was the first real inclination that I loved reading. But there was hardly any way that I could have built on that inclination. Money was short and mobility was limited. All I could read were school textbooks.

That has changed recently. I have been reading more and more courtesy of the ability to not only buy more books but by having spent days and nights developing my reading muscle. And that has really changed who I am. It has changed how I understand the world and my place in it.

How reading changed my perception of the world

Some of my beliefs have fundamentally changed. Here are a few examples –

Earlier belief (when I would believe what was told to me)	Current Understanding (based on what I have read)
You are born with talent. It’s in your genes or not.	Talent can be developed. Everything and anything can be learned.
We (humans) are created by someone called God out of thin air.	Humans are the result of billions of years of evolution and have emerged from a single-celled organism.
My moral choices will decide if I go to hell or heaven. Ex: Attraction towards opposite sex is morally wrong and you should feel ashamed of yourself.	There is no hell or heaven. Attraction towards opposite sex is part of who we are as human species. That’s how we propagate our genes.
Money could very well define the true meaning of happiness.	Money is important, but only a part of the true meaning of happiness
You always need to listen to your parents/elders because they are always right.	Your parents/elders are humans too – and they are wrong many times. You have to learn how to outgrow them.
Your first instinct about something is usually right since it is coming from your gut.	Your first instinct is mostly wrong as it depends on your old brain, which is driven by survival.
Eating sugar as much as you can is okay.	Eating sugar has many negative consequences and is largely a function of the old brain wanting to gather as many calories as possible

There are many such examples that I can think of. The point is I would never have updated my earlier beliefs had I not read as much as I had over the last few years and applied those learnings in my life.

One may ask what’s the point of all this anyway? My current understanding can still be proven wrong. That’s where what one reads becomes important. My criteria –

I read books that have stood the test of times or what we call are the classics, especially when it comes to topics like philosophy or religion.
I read books written in simple language that explain peer-reviewed scientific concepts. I am not a scientist, so I often seek help – especially from my wife, who is a scientist – to check the understanding I gain from these books.

Reading in 2025

The year 2025 was a decent year for me in terms of what I read and how much I read. I am limiting this article only to full-length books and not including newspapers or online articles.

In total, I read 28 books, which comes out to roughly 2.5 books a month. I would have liked to read more, but this is the best I could do.

THE BOOKS I READ (In order)

Patterns that emerged

Interestingly, as I look back, there emerged a pattern from what I read –

The Future of AI and humans:

I inherently got curious about AI and where it is going. I started the year with Sal Khan’s ‘Brave New Words’ which talks about how education will evolve with the coming AI revolution and ended up with Mustafa Suleyman’s, ‘The Coming Wave’ and Jeff Hawkins,’ ‘A Thousand Brains Theory’.

Reading them makes me convinced that AI is NOT becoming more intelligent than humans in totality for many years to come. Yes, it will do some tasks much better than us but becoming better than humans in ALL tasks at once is probably a far-fetched dream.
My childhood Wish List:

As a young kid, I wanted to read the Harry Potter books but never had the chance. I also tried to read Anne Frank’s diary about her time spent in hiding during the World War 2 (read my post on her book) but found it too difficult to read. This year, I managed to finish four Harry Potter books and the famous diary.
Understanding the World through Economics and Practicality:

The book that made the greatest influence in this category has to be the one by Claudia Goldin called “Career and Family”. It’s the book that got her the Nobel Prize in Economics. The central idea of the book that in today’s world where women wants both career and family, couple equity matters.

Another one is “How the World really works” by Vaclav Smil in which he says that despite what anyone says, the world will keep running on fossil fuels for many more years to come. Did you know that almost 83% of all our primary energy needs is still driven by fossil fuels? It was almost similar a couple of decades back too.
Understanding Happiness:

Since childhood, I always wanted to understand happiness. I have always believed that happiness is not driven by money or accomplishments alone. Rather it is a driven by good relationships.

This belief was validated by Schulz and Waldinger’s book, ‘The Good Life’, which has to be the best book I read this year since it gives solid evidence by the virtue of being the longest study on happiness spanning more than 85 years.

Some of what they said was also echoed by Arthur Brooks in his book ‘The Happiness Files’ but if I have to choose one, I will go with The Good Life.
Books on education:

Being an educationist, this category had to be there. But honestly none of the books I read this year gave me something new.

If I had to recommend my top three books of the year that everyone must read:

The Good Life
The Diary of a Young Girl
How the World Really Works

Add-on: Brave New World (a classic)

I don’t know what the next year will bring when it comes to reading, but I am hopeful that I read more than I did this year – and that I come closer than I am today to better understand this world and myself.

Any recommendations on what should I read in 2026?

REFERENCES

Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, Pratham Education Foundation
https://www.asercentre.org/aser-2024

Notes to my child, Philosophy

Why I Chose to Phase Out Social Media From My Life — And How You Can Too

Social media is all around us. And it is making us dumb, dumber, and dumbest. We are spending more time scrolling through our digital profiles than talking to our “actual” family members or “physical” friends. Our relationships have evolved to become more personal with our devices and online connections than with the fellow human beings.

Being born in the 1990s, I do have some semblance of the time when our lives were without mobile phones and social media. Good thing about that time was that me and my physical friends would spend most of our time playing active physical sports instead of being head-down in our phones getting dopamine-laced videos thrown at our faces! Ah, good times!

Recent evidence has supported concerns about early smartphone exposure. A multi-institutional study led by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found that children who owned a smartphone by age 12 had significantly higher risks of depression, obesity, and poorer sleep outcomes compared with peers who did not (Nagata et al., 2024).

Additional research links high screen time with reduced sleep quality, shorter sleep duration, and increased risk of anxiety and depression among youth (Saepuloh et al., 2023).

Personally, I have noticed similar effects as an adult. By tracking my sleep with an Apple Watch and observing how refreshed I feel the next morning, I have consistently found that my sleep is of much higher quality when my phone is kept away from my bed rather than within reach.

For years, I have been an avid user of social media. I remember using Orkut, one of the earliest social-networking platforms, and later moving to Facebook when it launched in the early 2010s. At that time, it genuinely felt like these platforms could help me reconnect with old friends, express my voice, and access the larger “know-hows” of the world. And, in many ways, I was right. For example, I used social media to raise ₹2,50,000 for a charitable cause a decade ago.

But today, the benefits feel overshadowed by the negative repercussions. My top five concerns include:

Invasion of privacy and associated risks –
Anyone can know who you are, what you do, if you keep posting about who you are, and what you do! It gives negative actors incentives to harm you and your loved ones by picking your habits etc. Research shows that seemingly harmless social-media activity can reveal personal routines, social networks, home locations, travel schedules, and even personality traits (Kosinski et al., 2013).
Weaponization of social media profiles by governments–
Governments, especially those interested in surveillance, can use metadata from social media (who you know, what you post, where you are) to track citizens. Globally, there has been growing concern over how social media data can be used for surveillance, behavioral profiling, and influencing public opinion. As more people share personal data online, governments gain more tools to monitor, manipulate or control.

I predict such weaponization is going to only increase exponentially and it’s a good time to stop sharing your personal data for future manipulation and misuse. Good books to read how such a scenario may look like are the classics: 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New Words by Aldous Huxley.
Manipulation of your thoughts and actions by current and future technology–
Social-media platforms already use algorithms to shape what you see: what content appears in your feed, what ads you receive, what friends or pages are suggested. These algorithms optimize for engagement — often by exploiting your psychological vulnerabilities.

As AI gets more advanced, this manipulation may become more subtle, pervasive, and personalized. The more these systems know about you, the more effectively they can influence your beliefs, moods, decisions — potentially overriding your true self. I mean, why deliberately tell machines who you actually are?
Misinformation-
We all know what it is and how easily it spreads.
Depression, anxiety, and the constant need to compare yourself with others–
Multiple studies link heavy social-media use to depression, anxiety, poor self-esteem, and negative social comparison particularly among adolescents and young adults (Shensa et al., 2018; Saepuloh et al., 2023). The design of these platforms encourages constant comparison, envy, and the fear of missing out, driving cycles of emotional distress.

It is for these reasons – or for the harmful effects of this addiction – that for the last one-and-half years, I have systematically reduced my social media usage. And mind you, doing so has been really hard work and I am not completely out of bounds!

If we take alcohol addiction, we all agree that it is bad for our health and there are both government and non-government support mechanisms to help you get over the addiction. However, despite clear indications that excessive social media usage is harmful for you, there are no widespread support mechanisms in place yet.

So here is a strategy that worked for me:

Track and observe your usage –
My professor at Harvard Business School used to say that “you can only manage what you can measure and you can measure everything”. Hence, the first step is to measure your social media usage across all the social media platforms (and yes, that includes Whatsapp). Do it for at least a week or ten days and see what’s your average. If it is more than four hours, you probably have an addiction problem.
Deactivate (not delete) your social media profile(s) in a phased manner–
Don’t believe that you can get over your social media addiction in one go. I have seen many people deactivating ALL their social media accounts in one go (mostly when they have a fight with their partners) only to reactivate them the next morning. And let’s be realistic – you are not going to “delete” your accounts so lets not go there.

Hence, a better strategy would be to start with the account you are spending the least time on. In my case, I started first with Facebook > Instagram > LinkedIn > Twitter. I am still left with YouTube and WhatsApp – they are being the most difficult to let go.
Temporarily reactive and observe your emotions –
Reactivate your deactivated account(s) and observe all the immediately occurring emotions and feelings. In my case, whenever I’d do so, I used to get the feeling of unnecessary comparison, anxiety, and FOMO.

Interestingly, I’d never felt any of these emotions when the account(s) was deactivated. After doing this at least three or four times, I could clearly see that these negative feelings were stemming from the design of these platforms and not inherently from who I am.
Fill the newfound time with meaningful activities or hobbies –
One of the side effects of phasing out your social media is that you will find that suddenly you have a lot of time. You will realize that you are finally bored! And that’s a good thing.

Psychological research shows that boredom can enhance creativity, reflection, and intrinsic motivation (Westgate & Wilson, 2018). When you feel bored, it is time to do things you actually enjoy doing.

For me, it was reading books (I have read 24 books so far in 2025), playing Tennis and being obsessed with my health markers (my VO2max has increased from 26 last year to 43; I can now run a 5k nonstop – last year I couldn’t even run 500m without catching my breath). Each person can find their own meaningful replacement: writing, gardening, dancing, learning a language — anything that genuinely nurtures you.
Keep phasing out and stand your ground–
Peer pressure is real: people expect you to be “on” all the time- reachable on WhatsApp, posting on Instagram, liking photos, replying to memes. But you don’t have to. Be honest with yourself about what matters. Stand firm. You owe it to your mental health and sense of self.

Imagine a few hundred years ago a person was kidnapped from Africa and transported in a dark, dingy ship compartment to work in forced labor in the fields of England or America. That person had no choice. Slavery was an accepted practice in many parts of the world and was not considered morally or legally wrong the way it is today. It took years- and a great war- for the society to recognize it as a crime and abolish it.

In a similar way, today – though far less visibly cruel – many of us are enslaved to our mobile phones, to social media, and are moving towards a scenario where we will be enslaved by newer technologies and machines that we will create ourselves.

But, unlike those who were enslaved hundreds of years ago we still retain a power they didn’t: the power to say NO.

And NO! we must say. Let us not glorify our own bondage. Let us not be slaves.

REFERENCES

Nagata, J. M., Rahman, F., Fiore, K., Bissonette, A.,-Peterson, K. E., & Cunningham, S. (2024). Smartphone ownership in childhood and associations with depression, obesity, and sleep. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Saepuloh, A., Santoso, M. B., & Hasanah, U. (2023). The correlation between smartphone screen time and sleep quality in adolescents: A systematic review. Medical Sciences, 13(6), 475.

Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15), 5802–5805.

Shensa, A., Sidani, J. E., Dew, M. A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., & Primack, B. A. (2018). Social media use and depression and anxiety symptoms: A cluster analysis. American Journal of Health Behavior, 42(2), 116–128.

Westgate, E. C., & Wilson, T. D. (2018). Boring thoughts and bored minds: The MAC model of boredom and cognitive engagement. Behavioral Sciences, 8(6), 54.

Anne and a boy writing in their diaries together

Notes to my child, Philosophy

To Live and Die Is to Express – Lessons from a Diary

The Question of Purpose

Purpose is such an intriguing word. Why do we choose to do the things we do in life? My dearest friend who dreams of becoming a filmmaker recently asked why he should bother pursuing anything worthwhile—or even something he loves—when, in the end, we all have to die?

It’s a profound question, one without a single, simple answer. Yet, few stories and moments often help us glimpse possible responses. For me, one such answer revealed itself in the pages of Anne Frank’s diary, written by a young Jewish girl who perished in the Holocaust during World War II.

Meeting Anne for the First Time

Called The Diary of a Young Girl, I first came across this book when I was just starting to explore the world of reading as a young eighteen-year-old. I remember trying to read it then, but as the saying goes, “you don’t choose your books; they choose you”— and in that moment, the book had decided to reject me.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to return to this book at this moment in my life. The thought about my life’s purpose shouldn’t be the cause because I do feel certain of it—to improve the lives of millions of underprivileged children in India—and yet, I still found myself drawn back to these pages.

Maybe it was a quiet intuition, or perhaps a kind of divine signal, that led me to it. I simply felt drawn to discover what this young girl of thirteen had written in those 330-odd pages before she and her family were taken from their hidden refuge and sent to the concentration camps. This time, the book let me in. And it has already changed my life.

Finding Myself in Anne’s Writings

Reading Anne’s diary made me think back about the time I had started to write my own diary (later discontinued) when I was in Grade 7 or 8—around the same age as Anne. Of course, in hindsight, what I was going through as a twelve-year-old was in no way close to what Anne endured. She was hiding from the Nazis inside a secret annexe in the middle of a war, unable to step outside, while I was simply navigating the small-er dramas of adolescence. But as a teenager, “your” challenges feel most important to you.

Perspective-taking and empathy takes time. Evidence from child psychology hints that empathy and perspective-taking continue to develop into the teenage years, with notable patterns emerging especially during the late adolescent period.

A six-year longitudinal study following adolescents from ages 13 to 18 found that perspective-taking increased consistently across adolescence, indicating that the ability to adopt others’ viewpoints develops substantially during the teenage years and continues to strengthen into late adolescence (Van der Graaff et al., 2013).

While perspective-taking shows steady growth, empathy itself follows a more complex developmental path.

A study summarized by Melbourne Child Psychology reported that cognitive empathy—the capacity to understand another’s perspective—emerges earlier for girls, beginning around age 13, while boys typically do not show similar growth until about age 15. By contrast, affective empathy, which reflects the emotional responsiveness to others, tends to dip in boys between ages 13 and 16 before rebounding later in adolescence, suggesting a temporary decline followed by recovery in emotional empathy during the teenage years (Melbourne Child Psychology, n.d.).

The beauty of Anne’s diary is that you can actually witness this growth many years before this research was contemporary. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, her writing reflects a deepening perspective and a widening empathy—especially in the way her relationship with her mother evolves. She begins with sharp criticism, often feeling misunderstood, but over time her words soften, carrying traces of compassion and self-awareness.

Shared Struggles of Adolescence

In Anne’s struggles, and growth, I found echoes of my own teenage self. Like Anne, I too wrestled with the urge to be independent—“please let me be… leave me alone!” I felt the need to push away adults—“I am my own person… don’t tell me what to do!” I carried confusing feelings about the opposite gender—“What is this feeling… am I in love?” And I wanted nothing more than to be seen as honest—“Don’t ever tell me that I lie…”

There were other areas of resonance too: Anne didn’t like Algebra, neither did I. Anne loved reading and thinking deeply about human emotions—so did I. Anne wanted to become a writer or a journalist—so did I. And despite the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews, Anne believed in the good in people. So did I.

The Power of Expression

But there was more than resonance that made Anne’s life special and why she was different than everyone her age (and beyond) those days and today. She was special because she chose to give value to how she was feeling—and to express it with what she had in that moment. For her, that meant words. Unknowingly, she had found a purpose. And that made her immortal.

The most wonderful thing about reading her diary is that you don’t feel that she was writing for the world. Living a double life —on one side she could be caught at any moment, and on the other she might survive the war—she still kept on writing for herself. She wrote to understand herself, to become better.

And that’s what makes her lesson so powerful. As individuals, what we go through every day often seems too ordinary. It doesn’t feel important. We convince ourselves that in the noise of the world, our feelings and stories don’t matter. For the longest time—maybe even for our entire lives—we ask: who will hear what we have to say?

The fact that Anne must have felt this too, but still chose to express, is what makes her life and her story so extraordinary.

Time: Endless and Fleeting

There isn’t much time left. There is a lot of time left. Which statement do you think is true? Believing that we may die in the next moment—courtesy of life’s unpredictability—the first feels true. Believing that we have years ahead, the second feels true as well. The fact is that both statements are true at the same time.

The double-truths resemble Schrödinger’s cat—the famous thought experiment where a cat could be considered both alive and dead at the same time

As humans, we know deep down that our lives are totally unpredictable. We can go poof anytime. Still, we go on thinking that we have an “entire” life in front of us—until it is not. And when we believe our lives to be eternal, we postpone expressing our deepest feelings. We forget to tell others—and, most importantly, ourselves—what we truly think.

The Choice to Express

And yet, Anne did not forget or postpone. She wrote. She expressed. Even in the confines of an attic, even in the face of constant fear, she chose to give her feelings a voice. And through that simple, honest act, she continues to live.

That, to me, is Anne’s greatest gift: a reminder that expression itself can be purpose. It doesn’t have to be grand, it doesn’t have to be meant for the world—it just has to be true.

So, just like Anne, we too must continue to express, in whatever way we can. For some, that might mean writing; for others, it could be painting, singing, filming (my friend), teaching, or even simply speaking honestly to a friend. Expression doesn’t have to be grand—it just has to be true.

For me, that means writing more, and making space for my thoughts to breathe on paper (and online). It has now become not just an act, but an added purpose of my life. And perhaps, in doing so, I will leave behind a small echo—one that says: I too lived, I too expressed.

So let me ask you—when your time comes, will the world know that you lived, because you expressed?

REFERENCES

Van der Graaff, J., Branje, S., De Wied, M., Hawk, S., Van Lier, P., & Meeus, W. (2013). Perspective taking and empathic concern in adolescence: Gender differences in developmental changes. Developmental Psychology. Link
Melbourne Child Psychology. (n.d.). Helping Teenagers Develop Empathy. Link

Two parents, likely Indian origin, holds hands of their two young children.

Notes to my child, Philosophy

The Kind of Love That Raises Us—and the Kind We Choose to Give

We don’t usually internalize this but, I think, we are, for most part, exactly like our parents. The debate between nature vs nurture in playing a pivotal role in building our adult personalities is an old one. Earlier, during my twenties, I had a firm belief that nature dominates over nurture. This belief, however, has now shifted entirely — I now feel that nurture matters far more.

This shift came from learning how children actually learn (my education at Harvard helped). It is also connected to my education in scientific concepts like the evolutionary history of the homo sapiens as species. Understanding how we are brought up during our childhood opens up opportunities to understand who we are today. It’s also the key to making ourselves overcome certain limitations our upbringing may have brought to us. Understanding our childhood is the first step in overcoming these limitations.

This raises the question: what’s the key to a good nurturing in childhood?

I think the prominent answer to that lies in love. If a child receives love from their parents, or from a “concerned adult”, it creates a powerful sense of stability in children. This feeling of stability extends well into adulthood.

A lack of love between parents often becomes visible in a child’s upbringing. It can make a child feel very insecure or afraid. Continuous fighting between parents can also cause insecurity in a child. This insecurity may well extend into adulthood. In cases when one parent is missing, the other parent’s role becomes even more crucial. They must ensure their child gets unbiased love from them. I refer to this love as “positive love”. It’s the kind of love you’d expect Harry Potter’s parents to give to him. It’s the kind of love that makes you brave, courageous, kind, unafraid of failure, and empathetic to others.

Then, there’s also the kind of love we may refer to as “non-positive love”. A good example of that love is what Harry’s cousin Dudley or Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy, received. Though unconditional, this kind of love had made both Dudley and Malfoy deeply insecure, turning them into bullies. It made them consistently compare with others, and nudged them to harm Harry at every opportunity they got. It’s the kind of love that makes anyone a coward, cruel, rude, clingy, selfish, jealous, and afraid of failure.

Few traits of Positive love	Traits of Non-positive love
Mostly driven by love between parents /concerned adult	Mostly driven by loss of love between parents; fighting/bickering between parents/concerned adult
Children don’t often compare themselves with other children	Children compare themselves with others, primarily driven by parents need of comparison or fear
Children are not afraid of failure because they know they can fall back on their parents; parents encourage failure as a positive learning experience	Failure is considered a reflection of parent’s report on their parenting; children feel failure is the end of the world; they hesitate in feeling dependent on their parents
Mostly make children kind, secure, brave, and empathetic to others	Mostly make children cruel, clingy, and show lack of empathy to others
The kind of love we believe Harry Potter’s parents would have given him if they were alive	The kind love given to Dudley, Harry’s cousin; or to Draco Malfoy, Harry’s nemesis at Hogwarts

Kinds of love that children get from parents/concerned adults

There’s a third kind of love too which is nothing but the “absence of love”. Under this condition, the child often feels conflicted with the concept of love itself. Having no sense of what that feeling is, they feel disconnected with their surroundings. A feeling of emptiness, or in some cases, abandonment takes over.

In Harry’s case, after he went to Hogwarts, he understood that he was loved by his parents. He realized this even though they were dead. He understood that love can be felt even when the person is not there with you anymore. The “absence of love” happens when, despite the presence of the parents/concerned adult, the child doesn’t get love.

As children grow old, they also fall into one of these categories as adults. This happens because of the intimate experience of going through it with their parents or a concerned adult. In a way, the children turn into their parents.

This categorization sticks through our adult life unless we take concerted efforts to understand our upbringing and make efforts to transform us into “positive lovers”. The natural categorization influences us to reflect positive, non-positive or absence of love in almost all aspects of our lives. This includes who we date and marry, and what career we choose. Most importantly, it involves how we raise our own children (if we choose to have them).

But what’s the process of becoming a “positive lover”? In my opinion, it has three steps to it:

Analyze and acknowledge the kind of love we received in our childhood. It is important to be non-judgmental to our parents/concerned adult while doing this exercise.
Determine our current category (positive, non-positive, or absent) as an adult.
Identify concrete actions/steps towards becoming a positive lover. Writing these steps are helpful.

The third step is crucial because it will determine the type of children we will raise. The children we will raise is directly based on the type of adult we are while raising them. Personally, for me, having the idea of children excites me. Many of my friends and I are at a stage where we are planning to have kids. Some of us already have them. For my future children, I want to make sure that I provide them with “positive love”.

Of late, I have realized that parenting is probably one of the most powerful tools for self-transformation too. When we will choose to parent differently — with more awareness, empathy, and intention — I believe that we will start to heal parts of ourselves we didn’t even know were wounded. We will begin to notice patterns in our own behaviors that once went unquestioned. We will pause before reacting, will listen more closely, and will try to give our children the kind of love we may have missed.

Of course, none of this could happen without taking the first step in acknowledging that our behaviors as an adult are a reflection of our upbringing. Accepting that is in itself a daunting task. By choosing to acknowledge it and raising our children on the foundation of “positive love” , we aren’t just shaping our children’s lives — we are also reshaping our own. Parenting, in that sense, isn’t just an act of giving. It’s also a process of becoming. We get a second chance at childhood through the eyes of our kids. And in that second chance lies the possibility of deep, lasting change.

Understanding the kind of love we received as children isn’t just about looking back — it’s about taking charge of who we become. Whether we grew up with positive love, non-positive love, or the absence of it, we always have the power to rewrite our story – and in turn, writing the story of our children’s lives.

Philosophy

The Money-Relationship Framework of Happiness

What matters most to humans at an individual level? Is it money, relationships, or a combination of two which we sometimes refer to as “happiness”?

Money * Quality of Relationships = Happiness ?

For many years of my life, I have closely observed what it feels like to be living in the state of feeling that you lack something, especially money. When I was a kid, money did not come easily for my family. My father, who was a highly successful civil engineer did not save much before he passed away in an accident. The immediate years after his demise forced us to live a life of constraint. As a kid, you don’t really feel these things. This is especially true when you have a loving adult in your life. Friends also make a big difference. In my case, I had both. My mother and sister loved me unconditionally and gave me a life of stability. I had amazing friends with whom I shared my life. In a way, for most of the time in my childhood, I felt happy because of the quality of relationships I had. These relationships made me believe that I wasn’t lacking anything important.

*When I was a KID*	Money	Quality of relationship	Happiness
High		~~	~~
Low	~~
Extremely low

Money-relationship framework when I was a kid

On the other hand, I saw poverty – the absolute lack of money – firsthand when I started telling stories to children in the villages of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan in India. It is here that I observed closely the daily lives of hundreds of kids who chose to come to school more for a promise of a free meal than for the love of learning. The quality of relationships didn’t matter because the lack of financial means made their day-to-day survival extremely challenging. It is my understanding that they lacked what I as a kid felt as “happiness”. The frame of reference for these kids having extremely low money made for low happiness in their lives, irrespective of the quality of relationships they had. Sadly, for lakhs of kids, that’s how their lives are even today.

Poor kids in rural India	Money	Quality of relationship	Happiness
High		Irrelevant
Low		Irrelevant	~~
Extremely low	~~	Irrelevant

Money-relationship framework for many kids in rural India

My assumption is that the readers of this written piece would not be in the zone of what is referred to as the phase of “extremely low money” where quality of relationships is irrelevant to the level of happiness they feel. In fact, the quality of relationships are what matters the most to how happy or sad, you, my reader must feel.

If I consider my life today, I think the quality of relationships I have plays a prominent role in determining my happiness. Money, yes, does play its role but for me it is something that helps me to not consistently think about how to earn it. Having “enough” of it makes me believe that I can do things that I really enjoy doing and to not fear about where my next meal would come from – something that a child and their parents in rural India have to consistently think about!

*My current framework*	Money	Quality of relationship	Happiness
High		~~	~~
Enough	~~
Low
Extremely low

Here is how my money-relationship framework looks like today.
Note: “Enough” is something that each individual defines for themselves. Enough is personal!

I want to go deeper into the quality relationships I have today.

First, I continue to have a stronger thread from my childhood in the form of my loving mother. Having that relationship intact and knowing that she will be there no matter what has helped me anchor key facets of my life. Having said that, there are many a toxic threads from my childhood that I have cautiously cut; from uncles, aunts, and friends who tried to harm me emotionally on purpose.

Second, after many unsuccessful love relationships, for the last seven years or so I am in the most loving relationship with my current wife; a relationship built on common foundational values of strong family values, respect, and freedom.

Third, my friends. Some of them have been with me since I was in school or college. These foundational friendships make me fall back on honest counsel from time-to-time and to live back what is “good” inside me in times of self-doubt and sadness.

Together, these relationships forms the pillar of what brings me happiness most days. My work adds to my fulfillment, but the security of enough money and the strength of these bonds form the true foundation of my well-being.

Now imagine, suddenly, these pillars go “poof”. My life suddenly starts to feel miserable! For many adults, this “poofness” is a reality, a source of extremely low happiness despite enough or high levels of money.

It brings me back to the question of what matters most to humans? Is it money or relationships? Maybe for different people, different things may be dominating their mind-space right now. For all I know, without having your “enough” when it comes to money makes life challenging and the same goes for the lack of quality of relationships.

The answer, then, lies somewhere in the middle. Where enough money meets quality relationships!

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Category Archives: Philosophy

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To Live and Die Is to Express – Lessons from a Diary

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Time: Endless and Fleeting

The Choice to Express

REFERENCES

The Kind of Love That Raises Us—and the Kind We Choose to Give

The Money-Relationship Framework of Happiness