Co-Author, Mahendra Jakhar is a former journalist, currently working as a screenwriter and an author. He has written scripts for feature films such as Manjhi, The Killer and Shagird, as well as for television shows, including CID, Mano Ya Na Mano and Seeta Aur Geeta. He has authored The Butcher of Benares, adapted into the Netflix series Mandala Murders by Yash Raj Films.

A Self-Help Book That Refuses to Babysit You
This book doesn’t promise to ‘fix’ you. Instead, it calls out the illusions you’ve been hiding behind and challenges you to confront the truth about your own life.

Stop Chasing Success, Start Asking Better Questions
Why does happiness always feel just out of reach? Why do we collect achievements but still feel empty? The book forces readers to rethink the very idea of success.

A Wake-Up Call Disguised as Self-Help
Rather than offering comforting clichés, the book pushes readers to ask uncomfortable questions: Are you truly living—or merely surviving?

Brutally Honest, Deeply Relatable
With irreverent humour and sharp observations, Shailendra Singh dismantles the polite lies we tell ourselves about happiness, ambition, and self-worth.

Interactive and Uncomfortably Insightful
Through bold fill-in-the-blank exercises and reflective prompts, the book makes readers confront their own excuses, habits, and hidden fears.

Because No One Is Coming to Save You
The central message is simple and powerful: self-help works only when you help yourself. This book hands you the mirror—you must do the work.

After the phenomenal success of his first book F?@K Knows, the entertainment maverick turned social entrepreneur is still not reverting to the phrase “God Knows”. Instead he is back with some more ‘Fs’ in his life with F?@K Knows: Dead or Alive. With the same honesty and humour, he sets out to share his latest trials and good fortunes and weighs in on some of the more universal maladies of our times by gazing back in his life and answering the questions: “What does he see when he looks in to the mirror now?” “What is it like to be the prostitute, the pimp and run the whorehouse at the same time?” “What’s it like to live with the mother of all mothers?” “Is social media really that social?” “Is there any hope for the ‘wired up’ generation?” “Does God have the best PR company?”

“In this book, Shailendra doesn’t shy away from discussing the challenges he faced in his personal life.” F?@k Knows : Dead or Alive featured in the Times of India, January 2019.

World #1 DJ Hardwell shares the love for Shailendra Singh’s True Story of Sunburn book.

Out of print. Available on select second-hand book platforms — search by title.

On Writing

Everything he has ever built started with a story.

Every ad campaign, every intellectual property, every new startup that met a demand that the market didn’t even know existed yet, started with an idea that refused to stay silent. Something that needed to find its way out into the world. For Shailendra Singh, writing is not a separate pursuit from filmmaking, or entrepreneurship, or music. It is the same impulse expressed through a different instrument.

He calls himself an expressionist. Not in the art-historical sense - but in the most literal one. When an idea arrives, the only question is what form it demands. Sometimes it becomes a film. Sometimes a festival. Sometimes a business. And sometimes - when the idea is too personal, too interior, too precise to be anything else - it becomes a book.

F?@k Knows was that kind of idea. It didn't begin as a book. It began as a reckoning – the loss of his father and a resulting a near-death experience that put the purpose of entire life into perspective. The book wrote itself out of that moment. Raw, funny, in-your-face — because that is the voice that he hears inside his own head.

The True Story of Sunburn was different. That was an archive - the urgent need to capture something that redefined India and archive it with the hopes of inspiring the new, young India to dream big and execute those dreams. One man. One beach. One experiment that became Asia's largest music festival. Shailendra Singh did that, and it was his story to tell.

This is what storytelling is, at its core - the human need to make sense of experience by shaping it into something others can recognise. It is the oldest communication technology we have. The story told around the fire. Every industry Shailendra Singh has built has been, at its foundation, a storytelling machine. Percept told the stories of brands. Sunburn told the story of a generation finding itself through music. The films told the stories of India to India - and increasingly, to the world.

In books, the story is the most direct.

With three new books arriving in 2026 — including his debut work of fiction, published by Westland — the expressionist is simply finding new forms for ideas that have always been there.

The medium changes. The impulse never does.

 Shailendra Singh is also the writer and director of multiple films, including the black and white, Marathi drama, Ladoo - currently submitted to the Cannes Film Festival.