Karma – A short tale

Rajan Balana on June 6, 2023, Category: Random

Once there was a poor farmer living in a village. He had a few cows and a small piece of land for farming. He used to make butter and sell it to a shopkeeper in a nearby city.

Every month, he would go to the city to sell the butter to that shopkeeper. He would offer the butter in the form of 1 kg blocks and receives sugar, pulses, and other groceries in exchange for the butter.

One day, the shopkeeper decided to weigh the butter. To his surprise, the butter blocks weighed only 900 grams. He became furious and planned to confront the farmer during his next visit.

When the farmer came next month to deliver butter, the angry shopkeeper told him how he was cheated and asked him to leave the shop.

To which the poor farmer courteously responded, “Sir, I’m poor, I don’t have enough money to buy weights for weighing the butter. I used to place the 1 kg sugar you give me on one side of the weighing scale and weighed the butter on the other side.”

The shopkeeper was embarrassed and couldn’t look straight into farmer’s eyes.

This short story beautifully illustrates how what we give to others comes back to us. It’s Karma!

Focus on the healthspan before lifespan

Rajan Balana on June 3, 2023, Category: Learning

I had never heard of the term ‘healthspan’ before. I thought all of the humanity is narrowly focused on increasing the lifespan, if not becoming immortal.

Healthspan means the length of life lived in good health without any disease. Investment in improving your healthspan will almost always result in improving lifespan.

One interesting observation that came out from studying ceneterians was their ability to resist disease. And not just resit by a few years but a few decades. That’s how they were able to live longer.

So if there one thing that you can take away from this is to gear your actions towards activities like exercise, nutrition, etc, to delay the onset of any chronic disease as much as possible.