Anuradha Sridharan

 I'm mostly a very calm person. I rarely raise my voice. I'm a human and I do experience anger and frustration at times, when things don't go as expected. But I usually tend to brew the anger within and not blow it out or shout at others (It's a different story during PMS days, I admit! The Chandramukhi in me comes out all of a sudden ;-)). This morning, I had to engage in a difficult conversation and needed to assert my thoughts. I could literally feel that I was invoking anger within in order to assert my voice. As I looked back on the conversation, the chapter from the book "The courage to be disliked" came right in front of my eyes. I had a goal - "Convey how I felt about a situation" and I used anger as a tool to achieve that goal. Could I have conveyed the same, without anger? Possibly, but it wouldn't have had the same effect. What triggered the goal in the first place? That the situation I had been put through was unfair. Even though the...

  I first came across this book in one of Ankur Warikoo's book recommendation videos on Youtube. The title piqued my curiosity and I ordered this book a few weeks back. Over the last weekend, I was engrossed in this brilliant writing, that dispels many of our commonly held notions and beliefs about life. " The courage to be disliked " has a narrative style, similar to that of Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie. It is written in a dialogue format, between a young man and a philosopher, who engage in a conversation for five nights. This provides a perfect foundation to anticipate and answer questions that would run in a reader's mind. I could resonate with the young man's questions at multiple points throughout the book. Statements like "People fabricate anger", "Desire for recognition makes you unfree", "Do not rebuke or praise" etc seem unbelievable at first sight, but as the philosopher slowly explains and answers the young man...

 One of the main reasons why I love Instagram is its ability to enable serendipitous connections - people who resonate with my posts, people who are on similar journeys, similar interests, and hobbies, people who make the effort to recommend books or other people whose posts I would value. One such conversation resulted in me discovering Amit Pagedar - findingawareness . As his posts connected with me so deeply, the obvious next step is to pick up his book . I felt so happy to see it on Kindle unlimited. For the past 3 weeks, I read this thought-provoking book, slowly and steadily. This book opened up a lot more insights about myself. I was so in awe of this book that I ordered a physical copy and planning to re-read it, one chapter at a time. Why did this book have such an impact on me? Is it the timing? Is it the questions that were running in my mind? No idea, but I'm just embracing it as always. A book arrives when you are ready to receive the message. Will repeat this statemen...