Manu Joseph is India’s sharpest literary wit. This, his first non-fiction, contains some of the most pitiless sentences written about Indian society in recent memory. Which is precisely why it disappoints - not the way bad books do, but the way a brilliant man does when you realize his brilliance has an escape hatch.

The question is genuinely radical: why, in one of the most grotesquely unequal societies on earth, do the poor not revolt? Why don’t the maids who squat beside kitchen sinks pull out the hair of their conscientious madams? Joseph has the nerve to say out loud what every South Delhi living room has silently asked and immediately suppressed. That nerve deserves credit.

But the book answers the wrong version of its own question.

Joseph’s real project, once you strip away the dark comedy, is sociological reassurance. He is explaining - to a reader who is very much us and not them - why we are safe. The “so far” he appends to that conclusion is doing enormous moral work for two words. It gestures at threat without committing to alarm. The drawing room reader finishes the book feeling they’ve engaged with something dangerous, while having been fundamentally comforted.

The most dangerous books about inequality make their readers feel implicated. This one makes them feel curious. Not the same thing.

His sharpest observation - that the poor don’t envy the rich, they envy each other - is genuinely brilliant and genuinely chilling. Envy between equals, not across distances. Which means the system isn’t maintained by force or ideology but by the architecture of aspiration itself. The poor are too busy competing laterally to organize vertically. Joseph notices this, turns it over, admires it, and sets it back down. He never follows it to where it leads: that this architecture was not accidental.

The grenade stays unpinned.

His contempt for professional humanitarians has attracted predictable criticism from predictable quarters. Wrong target. The more honest critique is that Joseph lampoons activists because it’s safe - even fashionable - in the circles where this book will be celebrated. It’s far riskier, and far more interesting, to ask whether the system he describes so acidly has any exit. He doesn’t go there. He has decided there isn’t one. This gets presented as intellectual honesty. It functions as intellectual comfort.

Diagnosing a problem you don’t believe can be solved isn’t courage. It’s resignation in a very good suit.

At its core, Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us is a book by a privileged man, for privileged readers, about why they should stop feeling guilty without stopping feeling intelligent. The poor don’t kill us, Joseph concludes, for reasons of psychology, aspiration, and the peculiar human capacity to find meaning in suffering. He’s probably right. What he never asks is whether the peace is just, or merely convenient.

He understands it brilliantly. He is not disturbed by it. And by the last page, neither are you.

That’s the problem.

Read it. Then read it again and notice what it didn’t make you feel.

I’m writing this without an agenda.

No resolutions to announce.

No tidy arc that pretends the year made sense.

Just a pause - long enough to look myself in the eye.

Last year taught me that progress rarely arrives the way ambition imagines it. It comes disguised as friction. As repetition. As discomfort you don’t get applause for.

I spent a lot of time building things that won’t show up in screenshots. Foundations instead of facades. Systems instead of stories. Conversations that didn’t trend, decisions that didn’t feel heroic, days that looked boring from the outside but mattered quietly on the inside.

I learned that clarity is expensive. It costs ego. It costs speed. Sometimes it costs being misunderstood for longer than feels fair.

But confusion is more expensive.

I also learned that effort doesn’t always compound immediately. Some work sits dormant, like seeds underground, testing your patience before it rewards your faith. This year asked me to keep showing up without proof. To trust that invisible progress is still progress.

There were moments I mistook exhaustion for failure. Moments I thought something was wrong because things felt heavy. They weren’t. I was just carrying weight that actually mattered.

I’m beginning to understand the difference.

Not everything needs to scale. Not everything needs to be optimized.

Some things need to be protected.

• My attention.

• My standards.

• My curiosity.

I read less than I wanted and learned more than I expected. Mostly about myself. About how easily the mind reaches for noise when silence asks better questions. About how often certainty is just fear wearing confidence.

I noticed how the best insights arrived sideways - during walks, half-finished books, late-night notes that weren’t meant for publishing. The work behind the work. The thinking behind the thinking.

This year reminded me that identity is a process, not a declaration. That becoming is quieter than announcing. That integrity is built in private, long before it’s tested in public.

I don’t want a life that looks impressive but feels misaligned.

I want one that feels honest, even when it’s inconvenient.

So here’s what I’m carrying forward in 2026:

• Less urgency, more intent

• Fewer explanations, clearer decisions

• Fewer inputs, deeper work

• Fewer performances, more presence

And here’s what I’m leaving behind:

• The need to prove momentum

• The habit of over-intellectualizing discomfort

• The belief that rest must be earned

Next year doesn’t need a reinvention. It needs continuity. It needs me to keep doing the unglamorous things well. To stay curious longer than comfortable. To choose long arcs over short applause.

If I read this a year from now, I hope I recognize the person who wrote it- not because everything worked out, but because I stayed honest while it didn’t.

That feels like a good enough ambition.

Until next year.

- Gagandeep

The premise is simple: people communicate differently, and most conflict comes from assuming theirs is universal. As he categorizes people into four color profiles, you realise Erikson’s four colors aren’t psychology. They’re a shortcut - a rough map of how people process speed, emotion, harmony, and detail.

What stayed with me wasn’t the model. It was the discomfort.

I noticed how often I mistake urgency for clarity.

How I assume precision is helpful when it’s just overwhelming.

How frustration usually appears when I expect others to operate on my defaults.

The book works best when used lightly. It’s not about labeling people. The moment you start doing that, you miss the point. The value is in the pause it creates - maybe they’re not difficult, maybe they’re different.

It also revealed something less flattering: how rarely I adapt. How often I expect others to meet me where I am instead of translating.

The title, in hindsight, is a trap.

It invites superiority - but rewards humility.

Read it not to explain people, but to soften your certainty.

Most misunderstandings aren’t personal.

They’re linguistic.

That realization alone made the book worth reading.

Used without it, it becomes exactly what it warns against.

The most valuable insight isn’t about others. It’s about yourself.

You notice:

• How often you assume clarity when you’re just being familiar

• How rarely you adapt your communication style, even when outcomes suffer

• How much conflict is sustained by ego rather than misunderstanding

In that sense, the title turns inward. The “idiot” is often the part of us that refuses to translate.

It began quietly - not with a resolution, but with a restlessness.

The kind that makes you reach for books without knowing what you’re looking for.

I thought I was reading stories, but maybe the stories were reading me.

I stepped into Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop of Tehran the way you step into a memory that doesn’t belong to you.

The scent of paper, the hum of a distant city, the trembling hope of young lovers - Roya and Bahman - meeting in a bookshop that holds the world still for them.

When the revolution tears them apart, what remains is not tragedy, but time refusing to explain itself.

I underlined a line I still remember:

“Love is not about what happens. It’s about what doesn’t.”

That sentence followed me for months.

It whispered that the stories that matter most are the ones we never finish telling.

During mid-2025, I found a fancy for translations of some popular Japanese fiction -

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and its sequel. Satoshi Yagisawa’s world is built from silence and sunlight. The story doesn’t rush; it lingers like steam rising from a cup.

If Tehran was love interrupted, Morisaki was love unhurried. It reminded me that sometimes reading is not escape — it’s recovery.

You return to yourself sentence by sentence.

I also read the first part of the very popular set this year - Before the Coffee Gets Cold — another Tokyo story, where time travel happens in a small café if you’re brave enough to face your past.

But the rule is cruelly poetic: you can go back, but nothing you change will alter the present. The only thing that changes is you.

The year 2024 and early 2025 had be tough for my startup (and me personally in general.) At some point, the books on my table shifted from hearts and time to markets and struggle.

I picked up few books that had been on my list long due. And having had decently progressed in my evolution as a founder, I always have been on look-out for something that ushers new insights - rather than being a manual for beginners.

I picked up Zero to One by Peter Thiel because it’s too popular to be in ‘unread’ list. While a lot in it wasn’t new, it read like a provocation - a reminder of why I had started up in the first place. I would recommend it as a good starter for anyone before they start up.

I recall few nice things:

Creation is almost always lonely.

that every moment in business happens only once;

the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t build a social network,

the next Larry Page won’t build a search engine.

Underneath the contrarian tone, the larger idea I would revisit again for any one starting up -

“You don’t get to hide behind templates.”

Don’t follow them as a playbook.

Then there was Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things - truth written in scar tissue. No philosophy - it shoots point-blank.

This was the book I really needed to read and it has surpassed everything to top positions in my non fiction reads. And I know I will keep coming back to it again and again.

He doesn’t glamorize building. He describes the 3 a.m. anxiety, the impossible decisions, the weight of knowing that sometimes there are no good options - only less catastrophic ones.

“There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets.”

It wasn’t just about companies. It was about life.

No perfect hacks, no clean exits. Just showing up, again and again, firing one imperfect shot at reality after another, hoping, somehow, to move things an inch forward.

I think I would want to take out time to write about this book in more detail sometime.

These two books together drew a rough sketch of ambition:

the dream of creating something that didn’t exist, and the quiet brutality of surviving what that dream demands.

As a founder and an adult navigating relationships and friendships - dealing with people turned out to be far more complex than I had imagined.

Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots arrived like a translation manual for human nature. On the surface, it’s a framework — colors and categories — but beneath that is an invitation to humility.

I learned that understanding people is not about decoding them, but about de-centering yourself.

That we are all, at some point, someone else’s “idiot.”

And that empathy begins the moment you stop demanding that others make sense to you.

If Zero to One and The Hard Thing about Hard Things asked what we build in the world, The Silent Patient asked what we build inside our heads (though it’s fiction). Alex Michaelides’ novel comes dressed as a psychological thriller: Alicia Berenson, a painter, murders her husband and then goes completely silent. Theo, a psychotherapist, is determined to make her speak.

But as the story unravels, you realise the real investigation isn’t just about Alicia.

It’s about him. And, uncomfortably, about you.

I underlined a thought about how we tell ourselves stories to live with what we’ve done - and how sometimes those stories are more dangerous than the truths they hide.

Silence, in this book, isn’t emptiness. It’s everything the reader suspects but doesn’t want to face.

It’s the recognition that we all maintain carefully edited narratives about who we are. And sooner or later, those narratives come to collect their debt.

When I turned to The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, the language shifted again — from narrative to distilled thought.

Naval doesn’t add complexity. He strips it away.

Wealth, happiness, freedom — he treats them less as goals and more as side effects of understanding yourself clearly and wanting less from the world.

Then came Gulzar’s Selected Poems — words so gentle they barely touched the page.

He doesn’t explain life; he hums it. His verses are like open windows — what enters is not meaning, but air.

And in between these two, I met Morrie. Tuesdays with Morrie is a small book with a very slow heartbeat. On the surface, it’s simple. In reality, it’s a quiet dismantling of everything we mistake for a life.

Morrie doesn’t insist you chase greatness. He insists you pay attention - to love, to presence, to the tiny, unglamorous rituals of care.

If Naval questions your desires and Gulzar tenderises your feelings,

Morrie does something subtler: He asks whether the ladder you’re climbing is even leaning against a wall you care about.

There were two very light reads I swept through - Deepinder Goyal’s Culture - an internal memo they followed at Zomato, given to every employee, and Ritwik’s I don’t don’t love you anymore - which gave me vibes like Rupi Kaur’s work. The latter is nice for mass appeal in college kids, but don’t expect much if you are a literary nerd like me.

By the end of the year, I realized: I hadn’t been reading for answers.

I’d been reading for echoes.

Each book — Tehran, Tokyo, the therapist’s office, the startup war room — had been a mirror of different parts of my mind.

And what I underlined wasn’t just lines. It was reminders:

• That silence is not emptiness.

• That leadership is not loudness.

• That love, once begun, never really ends — it only changes form.

• That people are puzzles, not problems.

• That meaning is not found; it’s assembled, piece by piece, from what we notice.

Books are not an escape. They don’t take us elsewhere. They bring us closer - to the person waiting this side - the one we had lost in touch with.