????????Special Booking Regulations & Booking Form: Fill & Download for Free

Ah, COPPAIt'll destroy YouTube and destroy all our favourite creators. Or at least, it seems like the new YouTube regulations will. Plenty of massive oversights, like the false dichotomy 'for kids' and 'not for kids' - there's definitely no such thing as content for general audiences. It's in the name of protecting kids, but it really isn't.It's really sad, because it's that sort of thing that's hurt wholesome channels like Special Books by Special Kids, which has been fighting to get its comment section back for a long time. And it seems like it's making other YouTubers less wholesome, where they go out of there way to be clear that their channel is not for kids.But what I really want to talk about is the irony of the ads I've been getting lately…I've gotten these kid toy ads so much I can practically recite them ( something something squish and slime, let's unbox it's glitter time…poopsie unicorn crush! My crush my crush my crush!) .And they are definitely targeted towards kids.Well done YouTube, well done.*slow claps*

Bestseller lists are compiled by records of purchases. If you look at a book store sales sheet, it does not record the names of everyone who purchased the books. Authors can and have gotten into bestseller lists by buying their own books.There is no regulation to prohibit that. How would any regulators know if someone did that? Think about it. Would you want a regulator that had a list of the names of every person who has purchased every book?Not only can authors do this, there are companies that specialize in helping authors commit this kind of fraud. After my book Black Iron was published, I received a junk mail ad from a company that told me for $100,000 they would buy enough copies of my book all over the country to get me on several nationwide bestseller lists.The New York Times bestseller list tries to resist this manipulation by aggregating book sales from a list of diverse bookstores (which they keep secret) and not counting bulk sales from big-box stores like Barnes & Noble, though of course they aren’t immune to manipulation.

Time for an unabashed, no holds barred answer.Let's get the most boring bit of the answer out right away: The books.To be quite honest, I didn't do any special book to master excellency in any of the subject. Most of my concepts in Physics and Chemistry were formed from the local tuitions I went to, and they were my saving grace when it came to NEET. I gobbled up all that they spoon-fed me, tried my hand in some JEE questions that they provided but never exceeded a set difficulty limit that I had. For practicing MCQs, in physics I did the Aakash Module from the start to end, each and every example and try yourself with the obvious MCQs at the back. Also did DC Pandey's Medical version to build some confidence, since this book is like a playground, there are mostly easy to moderate questions and very few difficult ones. Same for Chemistry without any additional book.The only thing I did in Biology was NCERT and MTG fingertips. Since I had a big deficit to claw back in just one year, I said fuck you to reading from Aakash modules after the initial 2 reads. I focused my energy on the conciseness of NCERT and forgot about all the other books people did for many reasons. Still roll my eyes when someone says “This was taught in 12th” for a fact that was outside NCERT.Now comes the interesting bit: The Environment. I was an obvious underperformer in 11th class, but I was very overconfident of how I would score in the upcoming tests. As expected, people took it in a wrong way and made fun of me.The culture of toppers in my coaching centre was also honestly shit. Except for one or two, most of them somehow hid what they were studying and also mislead people. To be in their good graces, you had to be a pleaser and maybe have a chance of getting some help.All this infuriated and bruised my ego in a very impactful way. I was fed up of the BS that was propagated at large and wanted to change things around. The only way to achieve that would be to change the order at top and create chaos: I had to best them.This was my attitude at the time:12th class ensued in the last week of March and I wanted to have a fresh start. During the shuffle between my two tuitions, there was a certain free time that would be there. I used to study in that 10 min span too, at the starting to set a pace for the year to come.I had to set a momentum to ensure that I would be victorious in this petty endeavour. I practiced as much as I could, going over the initial chapters over and over again, with music blasting in my ears to maintain a constant high.I was highly competitive. But that didn't mean I stopped helping people. I was always transparent about the study I did the day before, what books I read and all in all, a chill guy. I did regulate who I talked to and sat with to ensure maximum attention on the topics.I can't explain the satisfaction I got when I scored 4th highest in the 1st test. Yes, I didnt best them all, but I came pretty close and there was a lot of chatter in the class about how I went from being a sub-20 performer in the batch to this high. People asked my sis about any secret book that I followed that magically made me intelligent.My ego getting stroked that year had a positive effect. I still dreaded about marks before giving an exam but at the end, I turned out victorious many times.I didn't outscore everybody at my branch in the end, however. That didn't matter, since I had already achieved what I wanted.I wanted to bring a revolution, and I was successful. I wanted to show that you could be a topper and not an asshole at the same time. I wanted to show people that being a topper in a small local branch shouldn't fill your head with so much entitlement that you look down on people who score less. I wanted to show that their superior place could be usurped by the people they looked down on. (The whole para felt like a big, complicated, Vive la France )Suffice to say, after NEET, my competitive drive vanished easily, so much so that I didn't study more than a day for AIIMS afterwards, since I no longer needed AIIMS Delhi to propel me towards a good college. Helped me a lot in college too, since I didn't bother to check who was AIQ/IP when I met my batchmates.Life's very easy without all the invisible barriers we set.