The Good Stuff

Music & Artists

i always say it: if you’re ever going to stalk me, make sure to also stalk my spotify. i have great music taste. i mean see for yourself.

3AMride i like drives, i like music, i like stars, i like gedi. put all four together at 3am on an empty road and you get this, the best playlist i've ever built. kendrick, sir, prabh deep, mac demarco and the weeknd have no business being in one queue, and somehow it flows anyway. the rule is you don't touch it: no skip, no search, no queue. summerhouse is my fav floor in ncr, and i'm still telling you their dj could never.

jamming night kun faya kun bleeds into kabira bleeds into in dino bleeds into sadda haq. late at our house parties, once everyone's drunk to the brim and my superstar flatmate pulls out his guitar, this is what we scream along to. the transitions feel rehearsed. because they are.

The chosen ones three cousin brothers, one covid quarantine, three completely different sets of ears. one lives on dhh and bollywood, i'm old bollywood, ghazal and punjabi, the third doesn't touch indian music at all. we built this before spotify blend made the idea uncool. if spotify wants to see how a blend actually works, this is the reference: three tastes stitched together where nobody feels out of place. pasoori, cold/mess, redbone, sweater weather. hand me the aux when nobody can agree.

Clubbs Shubbs my clubbing playlist, all 00s bollywood, the exact songs 9xM ran between your homework and dinner. you are my soniya, dus bahane, mauja hi mauja, kajra re, subha hone na de, salaam namaste, muscle memory you forgot you kept. it's a starter, not the whole meal: shuffle at the start of night, the room finds its feet, then hand it off to literally anything else, _vibe starter_ pack has done its deed. last christmas party ran almost entirely on this.

The Goat DHH Playlist NCR ka launda energy, bottled. the delhi DHH scene is just better than bombay's and i'll die on this hill, it isn't close. seedhe maut, krsna, raftaar on loop until you're convinced you run this city and everyone in it drives too slow. whatever you do next is between you and your parole officer. i just make playlists.

Dare you rest bitch gym playlist. loud, stupid high bpm, zero mercy. as virus put it in 3 idiots, life is a race, if you don't run fast you'll be a broken anda. this is the music for not becoming that egg. till i collapse, lose yourself, levels, the ones that make the last two reps feel like someone else's problem. fair warning though, eminem does not give you super strength, pace yourself. otherwise you can still end up broken anda.

ਕਿੱਡਾ ਵੀਰੇ? the soundtrack to my late teens and early twenties. everyone files punjabi under loud, fun, one more peg, and sure, it's all of that. but it's also one of the most poetic languages we've got, and nobody says so enough. satinder sartaaj, surinder kaur, chamkila, amrinder gill, the lyric-first ones buried in among the bangers, waiting to surprise you with their beauty.

Tapas my actual work playlist, and perfect in its own right. the best of zakir hussain, anoushka shankar, indian ocean, titi robin, a little coke studio. tapas is sanskrit for inner fire, or discipline, which sounds very deliberate until i admit i lifted the word off adam levine's tattoo during my maroon 5 phase, (in my defence it was before i understood they were bang average). if you ever stumbled onto ma rewa by indian ocean and thought that's my vibe.

Magical Themes the film scores i put on when the work needs a soundtrack but lyrics would get in the way. you thought gone girl was a good movie? go back and listen to what reznor and ross did to it, the film is half their doing. everyone arrives here through hans zimmer. you leave rating max richter and johann johannsson just as high, and mildly annoyed i didn't tell you sooner.

गज़ल बहार you already know the setting. a quiet slow night, maybe a single malt, mountains outside or just a balcony that'll do. hoshwalon ko khabar kya, my favourite of all time, then chupke chupke, ranjish hi sahi, chandi jaisa rang. i named it bahar because it doesn't arrive gently, it comes in like a wave and takes you wherever it wants. uss halke halke suroor ka apna hi nasha hai dost.

Unspoken Words built for heartbreak, the breakup-and-stare-at-the-ceiling genre. haven't needed it for its intended purpose in a while, touch wood, but arijit-core does something to you whether or not anything's actually wrong. every gen-z has screamed tum hi ho at the top of their lungs at the happiest point of their life, not relating to a single word of it, and that's exactly the appeal. bekhayali, tum ho, hawayein. keep it for the slow days, or the day you actually need it for its intended purpose.

Books

Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts

an australian guy commits a crime, breaks out of the prison and escapes to new-zealand, somehow ends up in bombay, lives in the slums as a white dude, and somehow finds his way to pakistan, somehow, ends up fighting alongside the taliban in afghanistan. then makes it back to australia, gets pardoned, and writes this book. if i had 10,000 copies of this, i’d gift it to 10,000 people. no exaggeration! apple tried making a TV series out of it, but it flopped for the right reasons - they didnt do justice to the core content of the book. At the end of each chapter of his book, ‘shantaram’ has written a philosphical essay about what that phase of life taught him about life - and that is the real gold and apple somehow missed most of it!

by far, my most recommended book in my close circle.`

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

most of the first great art i experienced in my life somehow had japan in it, and this is the fiction part of that story. a masterclass in convergence writing: two parallel stories, alternate chapters, and they meet in the end in a way that makes you put the book down and just stare at the ceiling. an old man who talks to cats, a boy who is as directionless as you can get (apart from me, obviously), set in this dreamy, hypnotic world where two very different people find their identities, fight their fate, and carry their prophecies.

Outlive

Peter Attia

if what bryan johnson does syncs with you even a little bit, this is your next read. planning to live till 3 digits even after breathing delhi air, eating kebabs, and sipping old fashioneds? this is your next read. if you trust my taste even marginally, this is your next read. hands down the best book on health i’ve read in the past 3-4 years. read it before you start your bi-yearly fitness overhaul and you’ll actually understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Kaisa Kutta Hai?

Raahgir

raahgir is one of those artists i discovered during covid, somewhere in my listening sprees, and instantly fell in love with his writing. calling him a poet with a guitar would be more apt than calling him a musician. this is basically a collection of his small poems: satire on society, heartbreak, the ‘what is sukoon?’ kind of questions, and quiet motivation. it’ll hit you when you’re not expecting it.

surat station ke bahar, thandi bench thi, chai garam thi
bagal mei ek tau ke haath mei chai thi, jo lagbhag khatam thi
maine bas do-chaar chuskiyaan li thi, utne mei tau nei dusri sulga li thi
pehli ko faika zameen par aur jutti se kuchal dia
mujhe kyu teri yaar aayi, mai utha aur chal dia;

The 4-Hour Body

Tim Ferriss

if someone asked me to guess the author purely from writing style, tim ferriss would’ve been my top 3 pick. scratch that, definitely top 1, given how much of his content i’ve consumed and how much he’s shaped the way i think. i mean, just look: his personal blog is tim.blog and mine is fromparth.blog. the book itself is basically ferriss doing what he does best: treating his body like a lab experiment and handing you the results. slow-carb diet, rapid fat loss, unconventional strength hacks, sleep optimization, all tested on himself so you don’t have to guinea-pig your way through it alone.

The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch

david deutsch, a name you’ve probably seen floating around if you spend any real time on the internet. one of the great thinkers of our times. this book is about how human progress isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable. ngl, it’s a dense read, i had to re-read some pages because i completely lost the chain of thought. but the core idea is something i keep coming back to: good explanations are the engine of all progress, testable, hard to falsify, immune to variation.

The Obesity Code

Dr. Jason Fung

a real eye-opener. clearly explains how our bodies work, what actually causes weight gain, and the type of weight gain we should actually be worried about. makes a compelling case for intermittent fasting, not as a trend, but as a way to build a healthier lifestyle and undo past sins. highly recommended if you want to understand your body better.

Factfulness

Hans Rosling

all about challenging the biases we carry about the world. uses facts and data to confront our instinctive and usually wrong assumptions on things like poverty, population, and education. tempting to call it a ‘book of hope’ but it’s really a ‘book of reality.’ must-read if you want to understand what’s actually happening on this planet.

The StatQuest Illustrated Guide to Machine Learning

Josh Starmer

Imagine someone took statistics, blended it with dad jokes and children’s dinosaur comics, and created this absolute gem. If you’ve ever wanted to dive into machine learning but felt intimidated, this is the book for you. It’s hands-down the most approachable and fun way to learn. P.S. I’m a huge fan and even have a signed copy from the author, Josh Starmer!

currently curating more…

Podcasts

Huberman Lab

Andrew Huberman

stumbled across his “assess your mental health” episode on youtube late one night and sat through all 3 hours of it. next morning i tried two things: sunlight in my eyes within an hour of waking, and pushing my first coffee back by 90 minutes. sounded like wellness bro nonsense, but the afternoon crash was noticeably softer by day three (its science after all). i still watch maybe 10% of his episodes, skip anything that starts feeling like a supplement commercial. but when i spot my niche in his weekly release, it goes straight to the watchlist and i immediately start chipping away at the full thing in parts.

Waveform

mkbhd

i started watching marques in the pixel 1 era, my first year of college. now pixel 11 is coming out and i’m somehow still here. i know most of the time i don’t need another phone or laptop, but his editing and video quality are too clean to pass up. the podcast is the same energy: relaxed, current, background-friendly. the car reviews feel unnecessary and i skip them, but when a new device drops and he’s quietly annoyed by the camera bump, that’s the signal.

Flagrant 2

Andrew Schulz & Akaash Singh

two comedians who figured out that saying the unsayable out loud is fine. schulz and akaash are both sharp comics outside the podcast, and it shows in the writing. i don’t watch every episode; i click when the title is the kind of thing that would get me fired from a family whatsapp group. nobody is spared, not a sitting president of the us, not the mayor of new york. they cover it better than anyone because they really don’t care who they piss-off, including each other.

Philosophize This!

Stephen West

stephen west used to be a janitor, then started a philosophy podcast in chronological order, which is exactly the kind of project you’d expect me to pretend i found before everyone else. i started it thinking it would scratch my pretentious bone. instead it became the most down-to-earth thing on my feed. short episodes, no heavy jargon, just one idea at a time.

Lateral with Tom Scott

Tom Scott

if you don’t know tom scott, we probably shouldn’t be friends. this is basically a quiz show where the questions are so sideways that you forget what was being asked by the time the answer lands. i once said “oh that’s brilliant” while sitting in my office pretending to work, with tom scott running in the background. got suspicious looks from my colleagues, kept listening though. his other videos are also mandatory if you have any interest in why the world is built the way it is.

Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Patel

the most research-dense interviewer i know of. he started as a college student and is now talking to people who actually decide what the future looks like, which is annoying in the best way. the anthropic ceo episode was the one that made me subscribe; i had to pause halfway through and google three things and i am supposedly an ai engineer working in same domain. sharp questions, no fake humility, just the kind of conversation that makes you feel slightly behind on everything.

The Portal

Eric Weinstein

eric weinstein has phd equivalents in economics, math, and physics, which i didn’t know you were allowed to do. the episodes are heavy enough that i rewind constantly and still lose the thread. he was breaking down trump’s way of thinking before almost anyone else, and watching it all line up eight years later is unsettling in a way you can’t really look away from. not for everyone, but the density is exactly the point. he stopped years ago at 40 episodes but i keep going back for some reason to re-listen.

Standup with Primeagen

ThePrimeagen

if you know theprimeagen from twitch, you already know what this is: chaotic, loud, deeply cursed developer humor. it’s standup comedy built specifically for people who have opinions about vim and have argued about tabs versus spaces. i learn nothing useful here, and that is the entire point.

Joe Rogan Experience (selected episodes)

Joe Rogan

somewhere along the way joe rogan has interviewed almost everyone, so now my move is: find an interesting person, then check if rogan already talked to them, doesn’t matter if its five years ago. i lost most of my respect for him after the covid vaccines stretch. but he still gets access to people no one else gets, and when the guest is right, the long unhurried format lets them actually finish a thought. most episodes i skip. the occasional interesting guest is worth the filter.

Bio Hacking

Why I Switched to Black Coffee

My simple rule for the last 7-8 months has been just black coffee. No sugar, no milk, no cream. For me, it’s a sustainable way to support liver health while still getting that morning ‘kick’. If you want to give it a shot, try easing into it: start with one sugar for a week, then half, and by week three, you’ll be used to none. Your liver will thank you for it. And if you’re sensitive to caffeine, decaf is your friend—I drink it all the time.

CREATINE, creatine & CrEaTiNe

I started taking 3g of creatine about 6 weeks ago—after doing a ton of research, of course—and my only thought is, “Why didn’t I start sooner?” My workout intensity is up by a good 15-20%, and I feel like I recover way faster. I’ve noticed more muscle definition too, which I think is mostly because I can push myself harder. Definitely talk to a nutritionist to see if it’s right for you, but I can’t recommend looking into it enough.

Do circuits, not sets

try to gamify your exercise or gym routines. circuits give you that feeling of gamification of survival till the end which sets don’t give you. sets have lower stakes. in a circuit, every exercise you finish is a checkpoint cleared. you’re always 1 move away from the next one, that micro-progress keeps dopamine flowing.

currently curating more…

Movies & TV

coming soon!

What’s Next?

Stay tuned for more recommendations and discoveries. Got a suggestion or want to share your own favorite? Let me know!