Adulting is a Scam: The Unauthorized Manual - Everything Your Parents Forgot to Mention About Being a Grown-Up  (Paperback, Shyam Mudireddy)

Are you still waiting for that magical "How To Be An Adult" manual your parents forgot to give you? Spoiler alert: it doesn't exist. And if it does, it's written in Sanskrit by someone who thinks "WhatsApp" is a kind of yoga. Welcome to "Adulting is a Scam: The Unauthorized Manual"—the laugh-out-loud, painfully real survival guide for every Indian who woke up one day and realized they were expected to have life all figured out. Shyam Mudireddy peels back the layers of India's beautiful, chaotic grown-up life with biting wit, relatable anecdotes, and wild honesty. If you’ve ever been humbled by the Great Indian Education System, survived family WhatsApp groups, or tried (and failed) to explain your IT job to your grandmother, this book is your new best friend. This is NOT a traditional self-help guide. You won’t find step-by-step checklists or the secret to perfect rotis. Instead, dive into an uproarious collection of essays exposing: The Great Marks Race: How trigonometry and Sanskrit shlokas prepared us for everything except actual life skills. Sports Delusion: Why every parent wants the next Sachin—after engineering, obviously. The Friendship Factory: Navigating three types of friends—school, college, work—plus endless memes and dead reunion plans. Love, Bollywood Style: From classic filmy romance to arranged-cum-love marriages where true intimacy is sharing OTT passwords. The Great Indian Marriage Industrial Complex: Uncles, ceremonies, budget spreadsheets, and why your family is more involved than any event planner. The Family Circus: Where every life choice is a group discussion and advice is a birthright. The Happiness Marketplace: Mark sheets, job offers, housewarming parties—why the goal post for happiness never stands still. Miracle of Miniature Humans: Surviving kids armed with iPads and existential questions. The Money Mystery: Middle-class frugality, payday splurges, and the vicious cycle of “Do I really need this?” The Job Jungle: Meaningless meetings, corporate lingo, and explaining to relatives that ‘software engineer’ doesn't mean you fix their phones. The Political Theatre: Debating democracy in WhatsApp family wars and surviving election season. The Great Indian Travel Awakening: Instagram dreams vs. highway dhabas and getting lost despite Google Maps. And much more! Inspired by real-life disasters, improvisations, and those awkward calls to mom, this book is a heartfelt reminder: Everyone is winging it. Your “fully grown” uncle Googles mutual fund returns, your friend’s love story began on a matrimonial app, and even that aunty doling out advice can't reset her WiFi password. "Adulting is a Scam" is for the engineering grad lost in marketing, the freelancer who dreads paperwork, parents learning Minecraft from their own kids, and anyone juggling ambition, tradition, and an endless stream of WhatsApp forwards. Through every hilarious essay, it reassures you that being a grown-up in India is less about having the answers and more about finding joy in the mess. So stop searching for the secret—pick up this unauthorized manual. Laugh, commiserate, and realize: If you’re still standing after explaining your job and why you’re single at a family wedding, you’re already doing better than you think. Perfect for fans of irreverent, observational humor, this is the manual we wrote for ourselves, one embarrassing, glorious, masala-filled adulting failure at a time.