When competence becomes a curse, and every achievement demands a sacrifice—how much are you willing to pay?
Waidehi is twenty-four when her body betrays her. Fresh from cancer treatment, she faces a choice: accept the safe, predictable path—stable marriage, comfortable career, conventional life—or risk everything for a PhD she's not sure she deserves.
She chooses the impossible.
Curse of Competence follows Waidehi through the brutal world of STEM research at IIT, where being good at something only reveals how much more there is to master. Where unofficial networks matter more than official channels. Where women navigate impossible mathematics—biological clocks ticking against tenure clocks, family expectations colliding with research deadlines, the pressure to have it all while knowing the equations will never balance.
This is a story about choices that look irrational from the outside. About trading security for purpose. About discovering that mastery doesn't end hunger—it feeds it. About the invisible costs of refusing to become what everyone expects.
Set against the relentless backdrop of Mumbai—crushing local trains, midnight chai, Ganpati festivals—this novel explores what it means to choose yourself when every choice demands sacrifice. When achievement and loss become indistinguishable. When the only measurement that matters is whether you can still recognize yourself in the life you've built.
For readers who've stood at impossible crossroads. For anyone who's paid prices that don't show up as achievements. For those who recognize that survival and ambition are the same stubborn refusal to accept that this is all there is