Harikrishna Natrajan

Harikrishna Natrajan worked for a decade in the software industry, really enjoying the field throughout his job career. A software developer with proficiency in multiple programming languages, he chose startups as his destinations and worked in a lot of applications (such as WiFi networks and Android car dashboards) before they became popular in the retail market. Thus he enjoyed being ahead of the curve. His commitment to work on open source solutions led him to explore a lot of options and get work done without being tied up by the whims of a single corporation. With his love for travel, he found freedom and leaves scarce while working in jobs. With the full support of Priya, his wife, he quit his last job in the November of 2015 and entered the world of software freelancing full time, after trying it as a side gig for 3 months. Priya soon quit her job too as the two of them planned an ambitious, life-changing year-long self-planned trip around India. Nowadays, he enjoys life with his wife, who also quit her job, and both are always on the lookout for experimenting with self-planned travels, ideas for entrepreneurship and passive income and how to get better at life. He writes about his learning experiences on this blog.

Here are Harikrishna Natrajan's blog posts.

You complain so much!

Whiners. You can always recognise one when you have a conversation with them. A tell-tale sign. When you are around them, you feel the shadow of negative energy as they start berating. How bad their day is, how this government should never have been chosen, how insensitive homo sapiens are. As if problems on just the planet of earth are not enough, they start complaining about how harsh the sun is these days and how the ozone layer is depleting and causing global warming! Choose any topic. Name it, and they have a complaint.

While not everyone is a serial whiner, I am sure that everyone can do with a little less complaining. I used to complain a lot, but I realised a few things about complaining that forced me to reduce my habit. I am not 100% successful, but I have significantly reduced the number of whines and complaints to 2 – 3 every week. In this post, you will read about why complaining is bad and what you can do instead. Continue reading You complain so much!

Look, a shiny object!

After a particularly dull meal at my parents’ home, I went into the kitchen opening tins of chips and biscuits to look for something to excite my taste buds. One moment, my hands were busy, but the next moment, I froze. Something had just occured to me. I had found my main course boring, so I was looking for distracting tidbits. I wasn’t even hungry. What my mom had made was healthy and good for the long term. I was looking for short term gratification. I started reviewing. How often do I look for distractions that are gratifying for the short term, while I should be working on something that moves me towards my long term goals. In fact how often does everyone do it?

Continue reading Look, a shiny object!

Book Summary: The Pledge by Michael Masterson

The Pledge by Michael Masterson
Book title: The Pledge
Author: Michael Mortenson aka Mark Ford
ISBN 10: 0470922400
ISBN 13: 978-0470922408
Buy here

What this book is about

If you have been unsatisfied with your life or you are happy but feel that you can do more, then Michael Mortenson (his real name is Mark Ford, so I use the name Mark in all references to him from this point forward), the owner of several multi-million dollar business, teaches you a technique to get back on track with a process that helped him get his own life back on track. The process helps you approach your life deliberately planning each day of your life upto the next seven years. The seven years comes from the fact that Mark has observed repeatedly that the said period of time is perfect for making major changes in your life and be highly successful. The method approach will transform you as a person for years to come. After reading this book and the methods described in it, you and solely you will be responsible for how your life shapes up. The process is hard work and requires plenty of discipline, but that is the secret of successful people. Continue reading Book Summary: The Pledge by Michael Masterson

We know you love books. We would you like to give two FREE audio books. Grab your trial Audible Membership with Two Free Audio Books . Cancel at anytime and retain your books.

What losing my smartphone in the Himalayas taught me

My wife, Priya, and I were on a 3-month trip in the Himalayas. 25 days into the trip, I lost my smartphone. I carelessly left it behind on a bus and realised the folly only an hour later in our hotel room. The word ‘smartphone’ seems like just one object. However, it is much more. It was my my phone, our Internet connection, our reference book, our compass, etc. We had 65 days to go until we would be back to Mumbai, where I could get a duplicate SIM card. SIM cards are only replaced in a phone number’s home zone. I could have got a new smartphone and used it without the SIM, for other purposes like camera. But it didn’t make monetary sense to buy a smartphone from a showroom in Uttarakhand, when an Internet purchase can be much cheaper. Being on a backpacking trip and staying in different lodges every two or three days, I couldn’t even furnish a postal delivery address. So I decided not to buy a new phone until reaching Mumbai. In this post, I will narrate my experience of life without a smartphone for a little more than 2 months. Continue reading What losing my smartphone in the Himalayas taught me

Book Summary: Decisive by Dan and Chip Heath

What the book is about

There are moments in life when we have to decide between choices that we have. Moments like these are pivotal in determining which direction your life will take. From which school a child should go, to decisions on work, relationships and even retirement plans, there are decisions to be made. Very few of us actually give a conscious thought to our decision making process. In fact, there are places where we let our mind follow intuitively as if we were on autopilot mode. The brain is not even aware that there are choices to be made. Even those of us who are aware that a sound decision is to be made stick to a primitive method called moral algebra. This is a method where we divide a sheet of paper into two columns. On side, we write down the pros of a decision and on the other side we write the cons. We do this for every possible choice. Finally we pick the option where the pros outweigh the cons more than in any other choice.

In their book Decisive, Dan and Chip Heath, the authors of other books like Switch and Made to stick, argue that we cannot approach decision making as if it were an algebric problem. We must apply a conscious process that allows us to be certain that a choice is the best possible that we arrive at. Even after a choice is made, we should be able to prepare for mistakes. Continue reading Book Summary: Decisive by Dan and Chip Heath

We know you love books. We would you like to give two FREE audio books. Grab your trial Audible Membership with Two Free Audio Books . Cancel at anytime and retain your books.

Why reading is a unique experience

At Amritsar, the Golden Temple looks magnificent inside a sparkling lake. The Harmandir Sahib Gurdwara is the most sacred place for the practitioners of Sikhism. Under its golden dome, in the centre of the sanctum sanctorum, lies an artefact that the Sikhs consider their Supreme Being. It is called the Guru Granth. It is a book. It is considered the ultimate Teacher to the Sikhs, prescribing how a Sikh should lead a life of honesty, respect and dignity. For the Sikhs, the Guru Granth is not just a book, it is a living being with a soul.

While other religions do not directly worship a book, they too revere books which teach them the way of life. Christianity swears by the Bible and Muslims look upto the Quran. Hindus do not hold any one book as their chief scripture. While modern Hinduism heaps a lot of praise on the Bhagawat Geeta, there are plenty more such as the Upanishad and the Vedas.

I am agnostic with no belief in religion. However I cannot help praising the fact that every religion revers the ‘written word’. Every religion I am aware of respects the experience of the people bygone and recommends that we read their ‘written word’ and try to make our life better by using that repository of knowledge. It is also what our parents told us during our childhood and what all successful people keep saying time after time. Let me make it short and sweet. “Read Books”! Continue reading Why reading is a unique experience

My tryst with Astrology

Priya, my wife, often talks about a sparsely, but meticulously practised branch of astrology named ‘Naadi Josiyam’ (Naadi Astrology), practiced in Tamil Nadu. She and her mother had found peace in the past after visiting and consulting a genuine practictioner of Naadi astrology. Astrology is complicated science. Much of what we know about astrology is fake and hearsay. In reality, it takes a really knowledgeable and skilled practitioner to make reasonably good predictions. Most of these predictions really materialise. Still, I don’t believe in astrology. But after Priya told me multiple stories about Naadi Josiyam, I wanted the practice tried on me. I wanted to keep an open mind and look at the process as a science. Continue reading My tryst with Astrology

Stay fit for travel, stay fit while travelling

Hello friends, it has been so long since I penned a blog post here. To reveal the cause of my lapse, Priya (my wife) and I are on a one year trip around India. We started in April and were in the remote Himalayas where we had some blogging habit killers. First, the Internet connection was extremely poor, even non-existent for long periods. Second, with our commuting and sight-seeing, we ended everyday with fatigue and a lack of motivation to do anything further except crashing to our beds. Third, a habit once lost for too many days in a row is momentum lost and the sheer inertia against having to work to restart the habit has been getting in our way. We hope to get back on track soon.

However the one thing that neither of us lost is the hunger to keep travelling. This hunger has been fuelled and aided by a very important factor which never flagged unlike our blogging habit. Our supreme FITNESS. Continue reading Stay fit for travel, stay fit while travelling

How the world (mis)understands agnostics

You probably know about two types of people based on their faith in God. First, there are believers in God. They may also follow a certain religion. Let’s simply call them Believers in this post. Next, there is a group of people who are certain that there is no God. They don’t believe in religion, don’t like any practices that are religious and do not believe in anything written in the religious books, epics and mythologies. These people are atheists.

I don’t belong to either category. Because, there is a third group of people who don’t subscribe to either school of thought. They just don’t care. These are the agnostics. An agnostic person’s philosophy is, “I don’t know if there is God… and I don’t care. I am glad that belief helps person A. But it doesn’t drive me. But unlike the atheist person B, I don’t believe that faith is blind and that the earth is better off without it. I just look the other way!”. Continue reading How the world (mis)understands agnostics

How to invest 30 days in yourself

Free time, drool! That wonderful chunk of time when we can do ANYTHING we want. Importantly, it as also the time when we DO NOT have to do what someone else expects us to do. But wait! We may not be doing what others require us to do. But are we really spending it on ourselves? Well, sadly we are giving up our free time not by working for someone else, but by following someone else’s story too deeply instead of our own, even if their story isn’t inspiring or important to our own progress. Continue reading How to invest 30 days in yourself