Why I Write These Essays

People ask me this question with a specific look on their faces. It is the look you give someone who has ordered a salad at a wedding. Technically fine. But also, why.

I run a coaching business. I have students, batches, live classes, mock tests and approximately four thousand unread WhatsApp messages at any given moment. So why am I also writing a 700-word essay about the philosophy of sleep at 6 in the morning? What is wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with me. I have checked.

The Real Reason

I looked for something my students could read every day that was genuinely good and genuinely at CAT difficulty. I wanted something that was not a news article (too easy), not an academic paper (too joyless), and not a coaching note pretending to be a passage (too obvious). I wanted something with an actual argument, written by someone who actually cared about the subject, at the length and density that CAT passages use.

I could not find it. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I started writing it myself at six in the morning, every single day, while my coffee got cold.

That was over 180 essays ago. The coffee is still getting cold.

Why Not Just Use Aeon or The Economist

I love Aeon. I love The Economist. They are excellent sources and I recommend them. But they do not come with RC questions. They do not have explanations for why option B is wrong even though it sounds exactly right. They do not have a leaderboard. They do not know that you have been stuck on the same passage for twenty minutes and are starting to question your life choices.

GRADFLIX does all of those things. The essays just had to exist first.

The Other Thing I Will Admit

I enjoy it. This is embarrassing to say because enjoyment is not a respectable reason to do something in the Indian education industry. You are supposed to grind, sacrifice, and look mildly miserable at all times to signal that you are working hard. Writing an essay about the mathematics of diffusion at dawn because you find it genuinely fascinating does not fit that image.

But the truth is that sitting with a subject, following an argument wherever it goes, and eventually arriving at a sentence that says exactly what you were trying to say is one of the better feelings available to a person without requiring a prescription.

The essays are not what I teach. They are what I think. There is a difference.

Teaching is explaining something you already understand. Writing is figuring out what you actually think about something you thought you understood. They look similar from the outside. They feel completely different from the inside.

Why Every Day Specifically

Because CAT is every day. Your competition is reading every day. The reading habit compounds daily or it does not compound at all. I cannot ask students to read every day if I am not writing every day. That would be like a swimming coach who watches from the pool deck and says the water looks cold.

Also, if I skip a day, the essay does not write itself. I have checked this too. Several times.

What I Have Learned From Writing This Many Essays

The hardest essays to write are always the ones that seem the most obvious. You pick a topic thinking it will take an hour. Four hours later you are staring at a half-finished paragraph wondering whether you actually understand the subject at all. This happens regularly. It is, in a very direct way, the same experience students have when they read a CAT passage that seems simple and then get all four questions wrong.

The subject was not simple. You just thought it was.

Writing the essays has made me a better teacher because it has kept me honest about how difficult genuine understanding actually is. It is very easy, from the front of a classroom, to forget how hard the thing you are teaching was before you understood it. Writing about something new every day solves that problem quite efficiently.

The Short Version

I write these essays because the content I wanted did not exist, because I cannot stop thinking once I start, because CAT aspirants deserve to read something actually worth reading, and because the coffee was going to get cold anyway.

That is the whole story. There is no deeper strategy. There is no secret framework. There is just a person who writes, writing.