Importance of Walking

Rajan Balana on January 6, 2025, Category: Random

I couldn’t help but notice that I’m able to think a lot better and in depth when I’m walking relative to any other activity.

Walking offers the time where one can be with themselves. I didn’t feel the same while jogging or running as it requires me to distribute my focus such as keeping an eye on the road as well as people around (so they don’t bump into me). That’s also why I prefer walking in a park or on a secluded road.

Walking is therapeutic. I find it most effective doing it early in the morning on empty stomach. And not to forget, it comes with immense physical and mental health benefits.

I’ve personally brainstormed on a lot of ideas and analysed many situations while walking. I would highly recommend walking to anyone and everyone who see it as a daily chore.

Ability To Do Nothing

Rajan Balana on January 3, 2025, Category: Random

Lately, I have been noticing that I am using my mobile phone a bit too much. Not because, I have something important to do every time I pick it up, but rather to keep myself occupied.

It doesn’t feel like a good habit. It seems like as I’m trying to run from myself, which comes out when I’m sitting doing nothing. And honestly, it feels a bit scary to be in a situation where you are literally doing nothing and sitting there just with yourself. In a way, face to face with yourself.

Whenever I find myself in such a situation, I generally start to reflect on things I’m currently doing or things I have been doing for some time. You may think of it as overthinking. As I start to feel overwhelmed just after being a few mins into this. Before, I could get any further, Bam! Distraction pulls me out.

I don’t know if not coming back or not giving enough weight to these thoughts is normal. And whether this will do me more harm in the future.

Deep down, I feel it certainly is not normal, and I should do something about it.

System > Goals

Rajan Balana on August 17, 2023, Category: Learning

Goals! “You must set goals in life”, productivity gurus have been shouting from the roof.

I think goals don’t work for me. Because of the timeline pressure associated with it. It makes it hard for me to give my best.

Another thought that scares me is what will I do after I have achieved my goal. The most obvious answer usually is set another (more ambitious) goal. It is a never ending cycle of constant pressure, void and disappointment.

I’m not saying goals don’t work. Or you shouldn’t set goals for yourself. You definitely should. And they work best if you understand how to set them.

When I set goals, I consider them as milestones I want to achieve, they work best for me.

On top of the milestone, I believe in making a system. Let me explain, what do I mean by making a system.

A system is something where you take on an atomic activity and do it every day. For example, reading one page every day, writing one paragraph every day, and so on.

And systems are infinite in nature and they produce compounding results in the long run. It might feel in the moment that no visible improvement is happening but it’s only after following the system for a sufficiently long amount of time one can feel its effect.

Nuance – You’re being missed!

Rajan Balana on August 16, 2023, Category: Random

No doubt, our attention span is decreasing. Modern day content is optimized for views. Titles are clickbaity. So are thumbnails.

Short form content has blown up the social media usage. Shorts, Reels, Stories, and shit. People are glued to their devices than ever before.

In this race to bottom, one key thing is overlooked, ‘Nuance’. Endless consumption of content has corrupted our brains. Such short span of time spent on a single piece of content isn’t enough to truly understand it. We are forced to take things at face value, based on how they look on the surface. It takes effort to find how it works under the hood. This false sense of understanding has long term effects. It gives us the illusion that we are becoming smarter by consuming so much variety of content, but in reality, it is making us dumb.

Since we don’t understanding anything, we merely are aware of it.

Almost everything you read, watch on social media has a lot of nuance associated with it. And that nuance is crucial for understanding the true meaning of the content.

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.

Unmasking the Fraud: How I Almost Fell Victim to a Clever Impersonation

Rajan Balana on May 27, 2023, Category: Personal

Alright, I’ve got a story to tell today. It’s not fiction. It’s real, something, that happened to me today.

Randomly, out of nowhere, I received a call from a number identified as ‘FedEx Courier Service’ on TrueCaller. I answered the call, and the IVR said something I couldn’t understand. However, it gave me an option to connect with customer service for more information. I thought they could explain what’s going on.

I asked her why am I receiving this call. She said a courier is booked in my name from Mumbai destined to Canada. I was like, WHAT! She said it is held in customs because of its content. It has a few passports, SIM cards and ATMs.

It gave me the impression of identify theft because she said one cannot book an international courier without a valid identify proof i.e., Aadhaar card and PAN card. I was convinced that someone is using my identity for committing a crime. I expressed the same to her and asked to share more information. To which, she gave me the sender’s and receiver’s address details.

That’s not all, she advised me to file a complaint with the police if I believed it to be fraud. Something I failed to notice during the call but realize now is the sense of panic and urgency she created by suggesting that the courier would be handed over to the nearby police station, and I better raise a complaint before it happens the other way around.

Surprisingly, she offered to transfer the call directly to the police station where the case would be registered.

I was put on hold. The IVR stated, ‘Your call is being transferred to Ghatkopar Police Station’. A person answered the call, speaking in a native Mumbai accent. He heard the complete story, noted down all the information I got from the customer service lady. He heard it so patiently, I did not expect that from a police officer in India.

The police officer emphasized that he was speaking from Ghatkopar Cyber Crime Cell, and asked me if I could to Mumbai to file the complaint. And I couldn’t. Further, he said the line I’m connected to is the emergency line of Cyber Cell and that’s why he will go ahead with remote filing. For this, I would have to verify that no one else is raising this complaint on my behalf, and I’m raising it under no external pressure. To do this, he would give me a video call on WhatsApp in 5 mins. He gave me a number that he called as the official police station number, from which he’ll make a video call. I checked it on TrueCaller, it was identified as Ghatkopar Police Station.

He provided some instructions for the call. I have to use the back camera first to show him that no one is around, and I’m alone in the room. And I’ve to show my Aadhaar card on the call. In the call, he will share a case code that I have to share to the local police station, from whom I’ll receive a call within 24 hours. After the call, he’ll share the copy of the case file with FedEx and me.

I came to my room to pick up the documents. That’s when my wife said, what if this whole thing is just a scam? How do you know if the police officer is genuine? I was stumped. She asked me to call the local police station to check the authenticity before proceeding further. I immediately called Chandigarh Cyber Cell and shared the incident. They swiftly confirmed it be a fraud.

The fraudster called me twice on WhatsApp first and then called on the phone from the same number. I did not pick calls and blocked both the numbers. I’ve labeled the numbers as fraud on TrueCaller so others could get alerted and not fall for it.

It is interesting how an app that is used to identify fraud / spam calls is used by fraudster to gain victim’s trust. Because in the first place, I trusted the call as genuine because TrueCaller showed it so.

Let’s join hands and label these numbers as fraud on TrueCaller as fast as possible before these scammers deceive someone and take away their hard earned money.

  • +2225153543
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I don’t watch News and neither should you!

Rajan Balana on May 21, 2023, Category: Learning

In school, a misconception was circulated that news is an acronym for ‘North East West South’. And I believed it because the logic that news is information that comes from any and every corner of the world, was convincing.

As an adult, I find it funny, how easily we would believe anything as kidswithout cross-checking it. Surprisingly, even as a mature adults, we still do it today: believe the news blindly and get anxious.

The full form ended up teaching me a meaningful lesson. Since the news comes from all directions all the time, does every piece of news have an impact on our lives? May be not. Then what’s the point of involving ourselves in something that is nothing more than noise? It’s noise that makes people anxious, worried and deaf to real sounds.

It’s been more than 6 months since I watched the news and it has only made my life better both mentally and emotionally. Just like we keep food fast, try a news fast. Challenge yourself to not watch news for some time and see the difference it makes to your wellbeing.

My relationship with WhatsApp – From Love to Frustration

Rajan Balana on May 17, 2023, Category: Random

WhatsApp, an app that has become deeply ingrained in our daily lives, making it hard to imagine a day without using it. I still vividly remember the day I downloaded the app for the first time. Back then, it was a paid app on iOS. Plain vanilla and straightforward app interface intrigued me. The idea of being able to send unlimited messages free of cost seemed unbelievable. I almost immediately fell in love with WhatsApp, until it was acquired by Facebook.

Upon Facebook acquisition, I realized that the primary focus would shift towards monetizing WhatsApp. Fast-forward to today, WhatsApp has become no less (and perhaps even more) of a spam channel for marketers and fraudsters, much like SMS. But it doesn’t stop there. The relentless pursuit of tech companies towards increasing time spent on the app has made the situation worse.

Entering, WhatsApp status. I believe this feature was introduced solely to further increase the time users spend on the app. While I do understand that some people love this feature and find it as a great tool for marketing and broadcasting, what bothers me is the absence of an option to opt out. I fail to comprehend why tech companies do not provide the ability to opt out of a feature that is not the core use case for many users.

I believe it’s not too much to ask from tech giants: the freedom to have a switch to turn a feature on or off. I’m certain that many people would resonate with my thoughts.

Easiest way to identify what products to avoid in a supermarket

Rajan Balana on May 8, 2023, Category: Learning

We all go grocery shopping once or twice a week, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the vast number of products available in every category. With so many companies competing for our attention on supermarket shelves, almost every product seems to portray itself as healthier than its peers, making it easy to fall for deceptive marketing tactics.

Let me tell you the easiest and quickest way to identify the product that you should avoid in the pool of infinite and overwhelming options. First tip, ‘The greater the number of ingredients listed on the label, the more advisable it is to avoid’.

Here’s the second tip: most of you might already know that ingredients on the label are listed in the order of quantity. The first ingredient listed has the highest ratio, and the last ingredient has the least. Keeping that in mind, if the first three ingredients listed on the label are different forms of sugar, such as fructose, glucose or corn syrup, just avoid that product without a second thought.