Rajan Balana, Author at Rajan Balana

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.

Losing weight is easy! – No kidding

Rajan Balana on May 4, 2023, Category: Personal

You might think I’m crazy when I say losing weight is easy. Seriously, I’m not blabbering. I’m speaking from personal experience. During the covid-19 pandemic, like most people, I gained a lot of weight. I went from 74 kg to 89 kg. 15 kg, that’s a lot.

At first, even the thought of losing weight felt like a distant dream. I did what any sane person would do in my position – I started dieting. I cut down on my food as much as I could. However, it wasn’t easy because on some days, I would eat more than I should have. I was losing weight, but the progress was too slow and difficult to maintain. Sometimes it felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all.

I started looking for other ways to lose weight quickly. I supplemented my dieting (to whatever extent I was able to do) with workouts. Initially, I started cycling. It certainly accelerated my weight loss, but it wasn’t working as I liked it to be. Because cycling helped me make friends, and where there are friends, there are parties (mini – celebrations :D). Eating at parties cancelled out the progress I was making with both cycling and dieting. So, if you come across a fat cyclist and wonder why they are fat even when they cycle, now you know why.

While I was going through all this, I kept looking for sustainable ways to lose weight. That’s when I came across the idea of ‘Intermittent fasting’. It was fascinating, and a lot of chatter was happening about it on Twitter. If I remember correctly, Paras Chopra (Wingify’s founder) also talked about it on Twitter and also showed its results. I was super curious to learn more, so I dived deep into the topic and learned more about its working. My conviction got stronger when I met a doctor (through the cycling club) who had been practicing intermittent fasting for many years, and it had worked wonders for her overall health and weight maintenance.

I followed intermittent fasting religiously for four months and combined it with workouts such as running and cycling. That’s how I was able to lose so much weight.

I followed a fasting routine of more than 16 hours, where I would eat my last meal of the day by 3 pm and only have half a glass of skimmed milk at night.

How am I doing today?

I haven’t been working out for the last 3 months, and my intermittent fasting practice is sporadic. Even after all this, I am still around the same weight of 74 kg. And I’m super happy 🙂

Asking the Right Questions

Rajan Balana on October 11, 2022, Category: Reflections

It’s a common belief that whoever knows all the answers is a genius. No one talks about the art of asking questions, well, the right questions. If you don’t ask the right questions, no matter if a genius answered them, they would still be wrong answers.

That’s what makes it so important to learn the art of asking the right questions. Asking questions doesn’t just show your desire, curiosity and intention to learn more about something but also your own intellectuality. You can only ask well-thoughtful questions on a specific topic if you understand it well.

I happen to be in an interview today. The candidate was very apt in answering most of the questions I asked. He was impressive and super fun to talk with. However, when the time came for him to ask questions that he had for me in general, or around the problems that were asked to solve in the interview. There were only a few. It was hard for me to tell if that was due to the candidate’s disinterest or if he lacked the skill.

The conversation could have turned out to be more meaningful and interactive otherwise. Doesn’t matter the premise, asking questions, especially, thoughtful questions is a great way to spark some creative thoughts and ideas.

Simple Tip to Safeguard Yourself From Online Fraud

Rajan Balana on September 30, 2022, Category: Personal Finance

There is no doubt that the majority of our day-to-day transactions happen online these days. With the arrival of UPI, online transactions have reached an unprecedented scale from where there is no turning back. Since it’s easy for people to transact online, that makes it very lucrative for people with bad intentions to also take advantage of this convenience. No matter how much awareness is spread around to safely transact online, people are getting duped all the time.

I have noticed a common pattern across online frauds. A fraudster creates a sense of urgency and leads the person to make a silly mistake. They make sure that you don’t get enough time to think. Interestingly, fraudsters target a large subset of people as the chances of anyone getting trapped are quite slim. So they aim to gain as much money as possible in every shot! In other words, they dupe users who have a good bank balance and who commonly do large transactions online.

I’m going to share one simple safety tip here that could save you (or at least give you enough time to clearly think) from getting into the fraudster’s trap. Here’s the tip:

Apply Transaction Limits on your Debit/Credit Card and Account

That’s it! It’s that simple. You would be surprised that the majority of people don’t even know about this feature, let alone use it. What’s great about this feature is you can apply specific limits for each transaction mode such as Swipe, online, etc.

All of these limits can be changed at any time using net banking or a mobile app.

Bonus Tip: Turn off the transaction modes that you rarely use on your card. For example, I'm never going to withdraw cash using my credit card, I have disabled that transaction mode completely.

Hope it helps.

Life is Fragile

Rajan Balana on September 28, 2022, Category: Reflections

Whenever I hear about someone passing away at a very young age or unexpectedly, it acts as a reminder to not forget the fact that ‘life is fragile’. I don’t think any of us here ignore this fact deliberately. It’s just that sometimes we get so much caught up in the grinding of our day-to-day lives that we completely forget about it.

In my opinion, people are split into two extreme ideologies when it comes to how they shape their lives around this fact. On one side, people live by so the called quote “Live every day like it’s your last” and hustle day in and day out trying to squeeze as much juice as they can out of their lives as if it’s some kind of fruit. On the other end, people take their life for granted and endlessly push things to the future thinking they will get to it someday. And we all know what happens in this case, we have been there.

You might be thinking, what’s the point? The point is to find a balance. If you are thinking that I’m going to share some magical solutions/frameworks on how to find balance, I’m sorry, but you would be disappointed. Because there is no one size fits all kind of answer to this question. It is highly subjective and driven by a person’s moral values and priorities.

I wrote this piece not to find a perfect answer, but to remind myself (and maybe you) about the fragility of life.

Cross your Limit

Rajan Balana on September 26, 2022, Category: Reflections

Have you ever wondered how little we know about ourselves? I get amazed and at the same time laugh at myself when I realize how crazily wrong notions I had about what I thought to be my limits/capacities. I never paid much attention to the mess I created in my mind until I had to.

Lately, I have been maintaining a relatively active lifestyle. I have been trying to get to this for a very long time. I don’t know why, but my procrastination and laziness always won the fight in my head. But finally, I got over it and began my fitness journey with cycling.

I used to do a lot of cycling in 2016. At that time, the longest ride I did on my bike was 72 km. This number kind of became a mental limit for my capability. Until recently, I broke this record and set a new personal record of 100km and that too with around 800m of elevation gain. This experience made me realize how little I know about myself. It would be unfair, to say the least, that I completely underestimated myself. It seems our mind is always looking to define boundaries for itself, no matter the activity. These boundaries easily become barriers that are difficult to break through.

Every moment of our lives is shaping the boundaries of our minds. Since it is hard to differentiate if something is an actual limitation or mental barrier, the only way to find out is to try to break out it. You never know what’s on the other side until you get to the other side.

So what boundaries do you have in your mind that are acting like barriers? Think for yourself!

What do you fear the most?

Rajan Balana on September 18, 2022, Category: Reflections

Fear. An emotion we are born with and live most of our life with. We all have our fair shares of things we are fearful about. Whenever someone is asked for the list of things they fear from, you would get answers like, fear of death, cockroaches, height, water, etc.

The responses to this question follows a common theme. We almost always talk about our fears in terms of something ”external”, which makes me feel that the answer is either incomplete or deceptive. And there is more to it.

There is a troubling real answer buried under the cover of so called common answer. I believe, for most people, the thing that would top the fear list is ”themselves”. Yes, believe it or not, people fear the most from their own true inner self.

Find it hard to believe? Let’s do an exercise. Try sitting for an hour with yourself, doing absolutely nothing. When I say nothing, I literally mean it. Just sit with your thoughts. No books, TV, or any type of activity is allowed.

Once you’ve done it, let me know how long were you able to do this exercise. Was it super comfortable or extremely hard?

Comparing Yourself With Others? – How & Why We Do It?

Rajan Balana on June 8, 2022, Category: Reflections

From the time we are born, we find ourselves being compared with others. Mothers compare their baby’s complexion, weight, and whatnot with other babies around. Whenever a kid does something upsetting, parents don’t hesitate to use comparisons to stop the act. Your poor (or sometimes even 99.5%) grades bring the wrath of comparisons upon you. Over the course of our childhood and teenage life, we go through countless comparisons. Especially, at such a tender age, these experiences shape our brains in an unexpected way so much so that we think it is our innate nature to compare ourselves with others.

Social media sites have exacerbated the problem on an almost irreversible scale. The problem is not that on social media people only post the moments that would catch the most eyeballs, bringing likes and comments. But the fact is people are seeing a lot more of what’s happening in other people’s lives than they are supposed to and care about. As humans, for most of our comparisons, we compare our good moments with others’ best (at least from the look of it) moments, social media has made it a more common and unnoticeable behavior.

I would admit that I have been both a victim and a perpetrator. I don’t know who is to blame here. It has been passed down from generation to generation without any thought and will continue to be. But there is hope. We may not ever be able to eliminate this behavior altogether, but we can put conscious effort and thinking to bring it under control and pass a bit less of it to the next generation.

It took me a lot of time to notice this behavior and put in deliberate thought and effort to do something about it. My complete perspective changed when I read a Twitter thread from Naval Ravikant on comparison. I couldn’t find the exact tweet, but I can explain it in my own words. He said, when we compare ourselves with others, deep inside we only compare those selective aspects of an individual that we desire. For example, I wish I had such great communication skills as him/her. I wish I could have such a prestigious title/job like his. It’s an unfair and incomplete approach to desire and comparison. If we really want to compare (though we shouldn’t), then we should desire to take everything that person has both good and bad. When desiring to have muscles like someone, desire to do as much hard work and grinding as they had put into building it.

You want to own a business like someone else. Don’t just desire to have the outcome or the good part of the business. But also desire to take on the sleepless nights, worries, and stress that comes along with running a business.

I would call this a “full and fair comparison”. It’s hard to get away from comparison habit. However, the least you can do is change your approach to it. Whenever you find yourself being compared or are comparing, switching your approach would make you realize how biased we are in our comparison.

Interesting Stuff #1 – Money, Speculation & Panic

Rajan Balana on June 2, 2022, Category: Links

I love scouting and reading interesting content on the internet. If I have to categorize my time spent on the internet between different types of stuff to do like watching videos, scrolling social media, etc., I can confidently confirm that I have spent far more time on reading interesting content than on random browsing.

Sometimes I get too excited from reading a particular piece of content and happen to share it with my friends and family. They often post this question, “Rajan, how do you find all this content?”. My answer always is, “I don’t know how, I just came across it somehow :D”.

Surprisingly, a lot of my friends actually loved reading what I shared. I was looking for a way which could let a lot more people benefit from and enjoy, the content that I personally enjoy so much. And that’s why I wrote this page as I’m going to share some interesting links going forward through my blog and spread the joy.

I cannot commit to any specific frequency, but I can assure you that whenever I come across something fun and worth reading I’ll bring it here.

So here we go!

The nothingness of Money

It is very common that most of us stop running after money only when we realize the finiteness of our mortality, in other words, until we are on our deathbed or diagnosed with a terminal disease. This article would take you on an engaging journey with its beautiful graphics and storyline to elaborate on the idea of “Nothingness of Money”.

Speculation: A Game You Can’t Win

Do you check your portfolio multiple times a day? If you are, then this article is for you. I loved the example author has taken in this article on how climbing a mountain with its peak in sight got a group of friends excited, which on reaching, faded immediately because it turned out to be a resting spot than the peak. This article reflects on how we don’t fully appreciate the effort we had put into reaching a milestone if that milestone is not the destination.

How to Not Panic

Markets are crashing everywhere. Inflation is skyrocketing. It is obvious to feel scared and uncertain about the future. This article talks exactly about how to navigate through these tough times and refrain from making silly and irreversible mistakes.

That’s all for today, folks. See you in the next one!