Anti-Fragile Human @iamshashsharma

Day 3. Shillong → Sohra The road from Shillong to Sohra does not invite you. It tests you. Every turn feels like an argument with patience, every climb like a wager with belief. Somewhere between pine-scented slopes and sudden waterfalls, the sky staged its theatre. Rain…

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You choose your standards long before the world chooses you. I told this to friends who kept urging me to come forward, to share what I write, what I wrestle with. They meant well. But I knew one thing with absolute clarity: I would never do it the way it’s usually done. I would…

Day 2. Shillong. Shillong is sneaky. It doesn not reveal itself until it watches you first. It lets you arrive, lets you walk its slopes, and only then decides what part of itself you deserve to see. My second day in Meghalaya belonged entirely to this negotiation. It began at…

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Last evening I was eating momos when the red chutney pulled me somewhere I wasn’t prepared to go, back to the winter of 1025, when Mahmud of Ghazni descended upon Somnath. They said his armies came for gold, but history rarely runs on single motives. What Ghazni really plundered…

Touchdown Shillong. After weeks of delaying and hesitating, I booked the ticket to another solo trip. I have taken over a hundred flights in my life, but something shifted after the crash in June. Since then, thought of take-off felt like a mental negotiation with mortality. Yet…

Watching clouds from an airplane window should be declared a discipline. A ritual where you abandon the ordinary idea of travel and enter something closer to trespass. From here, the Earth stops behaving like geography and starts behaving like memory. The ground below lies like…

Delhi T1. 08:42 AM. Glass walls sweating with sunlight. Luggage wheels rattling on tiles that sound more expensive than they are. Digiyatri face scan. “Sir, thoda seedha khade ho jaiye.” You wonder if the machine will recognize you. The photo was taken five years and several…

Unread books unsettle me. They sit there like unopened letters from a version of myself I haven’t met yet. Each spine carries a question I haven’t asked, a possibility I haven’t lived. Does knowledge only exist when consumed, or does its potential exert a quiet force even before…

Do we have time? Of course not. We never had time. Even when there was nothing to do, humans found a way to invent urgency. In the ancient world, time was dictated by the sun and the seasons. You planted when it was warm and harvested when it was cooler. The rest of the year,…

Perfectionism is the prison of progress. It begins with the illusion of high standards but ends as a lifelong delay. A manuscript always being edited. A product perpetually in beta. A life paused until every variable is in place. The perfect timing, the perfect body, the perfect…

Be the change you wish to see That has been my motto for as long as I can remember. Yet change is not a lightning bolt that strikes from the sky. It is more like a seed planted in silence, in soil that may not even look fertile to the naked eye. You water it with words, with…

There is no one like Maa She keeps you in her womb for nine months, carrying storms in silence while the world moves on as if nothing is happening. Her body becomes your first home, her heartbeat your first song, her breath the first lullaby you ever know. From the moment you…

Most advice is poison. That's because most people do not know your journey. They see fragments - a promotion, a tweet, a breakup, a photograph - and fill the empty spaces with their own imagination. What you carry within you, they replace with their projections. To them, you are…

Failure is fertile. We’ve been taught to run from it. To erase its fingerprints. To dress it up as “feedback” so it feels palatable. But what if the problem isn’t failure itself, but the way we’ve been taught to see it? What if failure isn’t a detour, but the original road?…

This morning, when I went for a walk, I stood beneath a tree and wondered about the quiet heroism of a seed. A tiny fragment of matter, flung into the earth almost carelessly, carries within it the blueprints of forests. It begins in darkness, trapped beneath layers of soil,…

Radha Ashtami and the Quiet of Longing The universe began in silence. From that silence came movement. From movement came distance. Stars drifted apart. Worlds formed and scattered. Everything moved away from everything else. Yet within this dispersal there remains a pull. What…

You spend your life building the idea of who you are. The roles, the stories, the judgments, all stacked one upon another. Then one day you notice the space between thoughts, and you see that you are not the story at all. You are the awareness behind it. The river does not…

To the woman whose absence rewrites my presence, Some nights, when Delhi slows and even the Metro hum fades into the distance, I imagine you by the window. Not here. Somewhere else. Maybe Florence. Maybe Prague. A city with cobbled streets and soft light where you’re drinking…