About

Hi! I’m Ranjana and live in Bangalore, India.😃

I’ve forever wanted to have a space of my own to share my musings, inspiration, projects, and experiments. And so, this website was born:) Also, who doesn’t have a blog or a website these days? Seemingly, everyone and their brother!

Having lived in Bangalore my entire life (save for three years when I lived in Chennai), I have an abiding love for the city, its people, and South Indian food. I am a trained Bhratanatyam dancer and learnt it for over 20 years. Learning an art form for as long as I did starting at age five shaped some qualities which I think are the cornerstones of who I am such as discipline, hard work, and expression of one’s inner self. I’ve been a vegan for over half a decade now and it’s an important part of my identity. The journey has helped me become more connected and compassionate towards all living creatures on the planet.

I have a background in pure sciences and management and worked in sales, mostly in startups, for over 6 years. Along the way, I co-founded a sales tech startup, a roller coaster of a ride that I will always cherish. My professional journey helped my introverted, timid self become more people-loving and enabled me to develop my hustle muscle and some important skill sets which will serve me well no matter what career path I choose.

Why this website now? I’m at an interesting point in my life. A series of events in 2019 led me to decide that I wanted to make being a ‘writer’ a part of my core identity. I can’t tell you just how much this means to me. I’ve started leaning into life as a writer and blogger while embarking on a bold, untethered journey as an explorer of life.

This website is my platform to explore topics that deeply matter to me and define me as a person (though, of course, that’s a constantly evolving thing) in the hopes that it might inspire, help, and uplift others. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in personal growth. This was the primary force that led me to go vegan, start my own business, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, run a marathon, and make personal development an inseparable part of my life. I think I’ve barely scratched the surface, though. It’s my endeavor to explore all of the following and more:

What does it mean to lead a life of courage, compassion, and love?

What does it mean to love oneself – truly love oneself?

How does one strengthen their sense of self and identity?

What does a life of contribution, care, and service look like?

How does one develop a strong, intelligent, and empowering mind?

What does a take to create a life beyond one’s wildest dreams?

As I embark on this journey, I’m reminded of the song Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield:

I am unwritten, can’t read my mind
I’m undefined
I’m just beginning, the pen’s in my hand
Ending unplanned

Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find
Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

Much love <3

Ranjana

Latest Posts
A daily journal with prompts for Practicing Gratitude, Becoming Joyful, and Appreciating Life Buy now A beautifully designed, uplifting journal that helps you feel an overarching sense of gratitude, optimism, and joy on a daily basis. Do you often go to bed dissatisfied with your day? Does the negative voice in your head remind you of all the things that suck or aren’t going right in your life? Day by Day Positivity gently helps you change your internal dialogue and go to bed every night feeling genuinely grateful, optimistic, and satisfied. The writing prompts in the morning are designed for self-exploration and discovery. They are easy, enjoyable, and take just 5 minutes to complete. At the end of it, you’ll have a smile on your face and a pep in your step that you can carry with you for the rest of the day. The 5 minutes of guided reflection in the evening helps you wind down feeling grateful for the day gone by and eager to meet the day to come. This is a 66-day guided daily journal for women and men – basically for anyone who wants to make appreciation, positive thinking, and happiness a way of life. Why 66 days? Studies have shown that on average, this is the number of days it takes to form a new habit. So if you want to make an attitude of gratitude a habit and positive thinking a way of life (rather than something that happens to you by accident), it makes sense to practice it for 66 days!It’s time to give yourself the gift of Day by Day Positivity. Buy now [...] Read more...
For starters, I am glad that I framed it as a value exploration (as opposed to a challenge). It truly was an exploration and the time frame for each value – one week – was just right. I feel like I’ve developed a sense of familiarity with the values and my value palette has become more robust and nuanced. What I mean by that is that I understand both the subtle and the overt differences and similarities between various values. That has, in turn, improved my value vocabulary at an intellectual as well as emotional level. I loved how just holding a value at the back of my mind enabled me to embody it, at least to an extent. It was hard not to focus on being productive when I was thinking about the word ‘productive’ all day every day for a week. It was hard not to feel appreciative when I was practicing a vibe of appreciation. Goes to show how valuable and powerful intentions can be. I also enjoyed looking at a value from various angles and playing on the word to practice it in different ways. For example, resolve could mean resolving an issue or being resolute. This helped me apply the value in several ways and it was way more fun than having just one, direct method of application. To recap, here are the values I practiced: Punctuality Orderliness Vulnerability Grace Authenticity Equanimity Engagement Compassion Experimentation Curiosity Fun Intensity Groundedness Flow Openheartedness Ease Compersion Connection Harmony Satisfaction Commitment Appreciation Expansion Consistency Accountability Clarity Focus Fulfillment Action Decisiveness Wellness Trust Resolve Closure Pronoia Discipline Understanding Alignment Rest Integrity Strength Faith Imagination Motivation Intention Assurance Surrender Moxie Adventure Pleasure Openness Celebration Here are my favourite ones and my one-line conclusions about each: Curiosity – one of the best, if not the best, values for creating a low-pressure way of leaning into anything, especially something new or scary. Appreciation – the quickest way to beat negativity of any form and see the beauty in life. Compersion – shortcut to feeling successful and happy irrespective of my personal accomplishments and to feeling a sense of oneness with others Pronoia – to finally understand that life is always on my side and I am, fundamentally, safe here. How beautiful is that state? Alignment – to ensure that I am living in accordance with my internal compass Moxie – meaningful to me in particular because it captures the essence of who Ranjana is Adventure – because that’s what I want my life to be; one wild, beautiful adventure 🙂 This exploration helped me get a better understanding of what values matter to me. Some are already a part of who I am and some others need to still be integrated. I’m grateful that I decided to do this in a format that worked really well for me. I might go deeper into it at some point. I have toyed with the idea of doing an exploration of what I call ‘shadow values’ which is basically exploring (not necessarily though actively practicing) values that aren’t ‘positive’ or ‘lightworker’ on the surface such as anger, jealousy, cruelty, etc. I truly think that they hold just as much power and are just as important for growth. We’ll see where my adventures in growth take me. I do think shadow work is very much going to be part of my journey.:) 2022 My word for 2022 is adventure and my plan is to live it quite literally by traveling to different places – something I haven’t really done until now, having spent almost all of my life in Bangalore. Nothing sparks my adventurous nature as traveling does. It started with eight weeks in Sri Lanka earlier this year. I’m headed to Bali in mid-June. I plan to let the path unfold and surf the wave. 😀 It’s going to be one wild, beautiful ride! [...] Read more...
Week 51 (Dec 17th to 23rd) – Openness The preceding weeks made me curious about exploring openness as a value. If I truly wanted to co-create with reality, I needed to have an openness toward what it presented to me. I do feel like reality playfully tested me to see if I truly meant what I was saying. A few things happened which would have usually made me frustrated but because I was in a different vibe, they didn’t bother me as much. For example, my phone fell into hot water and I had to buy a new one. The visa extension portal didn’t work which would mean extra work in Sri Lanka. But because I had an open vibe, I got to become friends with some really cool people I met. Knowing that they were there helped me decide to head back to Sri Lanka for another couple of months. I was also able to reconnect with some old friends deeply during this time. I had more clarity about how I wanted the new year to unfold business-wise. Week 52 (Dec 24th to 31st) – Celebration I wanted to end this exploration on a high note. I was back in Sri Lanka after a gap of ten days, so every sunset on the beach, every moment spent relaxing on a sunbed reading a book, every conversation, every party, and every moment spent just soaking up the vibe of the town I was in felt like a celebration of life. I thoroughly enjoyed the parties I attended and all the dancing I did too. It had been a while since I’d danced my legs off, so it was awesome to give expression to that part of me. I also appreciated all the amazing human beings I met and the friendships I forged! They were by no means a small part of the celebration. 😀 *** I’ll write another post summarising my takeaways from this exploration soon! [...] Read more...
Week 49 (Dec 3rd to Dec 9th) – Adventure This fit perfectly with my (first) trip to Sri Lanka, for, it was such an adventure. Traveling the way I did without planning and allowing each day to lead me to the next destination made it even more of an adventure. I truly felt that I was co-creating it with life itself and it flowed in a fun and easy way. Going forward, I want all my trips to be this way. I might still have a broad plan in place but for the most part, I want to allow plenty of scope for spontaneity and inspiration. Week 50 (Dec 10th to 16th) – Pleasure I was enjoying myself so much on the trip that I decided to focus on pleasure as my value for this week. It was interesting to make pleasure itself the reason to do anything at all, mostly because we are not trained to think that way. We usually don’t do things because of the sheer pleasure of it. But there’s so much power in that. I found that it put me in an expansive, abundant mode – something that’s not accessible if we do things because that’s what we ‘should’ be doing. I certainly had a lot of pleasure that week, in every sense of the word. My mind, body, heart, and spirit were all thoroughly pleased. [...] Read more...
As I shared in the previous post, I listened to Tim Ferriss’s interview with Whitney Wolfe Herd, the CEO of Bumble. She mentioned that her first choice of name for Bumble was Moxie. It means, ‘force of character, determination, or nerve.’ I loved that. I’m a sucker for rarely-used words, so this one was right up my alley. The most significant way this value showed was the manner in which I planned my trip to Sri Lanka. I’m usually someone who likes to be cautious and well-planned. I like having an itinerary, I like my hotel stays booked, and I like knowing what’s going to happen from the very beginning until the day I return home. Inspired by moxie, I decided to take a trust-based approach to the trip. It was frankly scary but also exciting. I later found out that I was well able to surf the wave of ambiguity and openness. It shouldn’t have surprised me, in hindsight. This was what I’d discovered working with early-stage startups too. I seem to thrive in the excitement of not having everything laid out and being the one to set things up from scratch. I should also note that just the feeling I had holding this value at the back of my mind was amazing. The difference was one of sure-footedness vs doubt, clarity vs ambiguity. It makes me wonder how many values we can embody by literally just holding them at the back of our minds because that was essentially what happened here. [...] Read more...
Week #46 – Assurance I paid attention to how my internal and external reality changed when I focused on feeling assured. First of all, I felt pulled to pay attention to people (public figures and people in my personal life) who had this quality. As I consumed more of the material they’ve put out there, I could see how they embodied this value in everything; from their demeanor to the work they did. Secondly, I stumbled upon content online that spoke about this value, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Of course, it could have just been my reticular activating system seeking out patterns, but it did the joy nonetheless. Thirdly, I found myself feeling more assured at times. It wasn’t like I was consciously trying to feel this way, I just felt better about myself and my abilities, which felt great. Interestingly, I was able to be more vulnerable and authentic when I felt better about myself. Week #47 – Surrender I wanted to experiment with the concept/value of surrender for a week. There were some situations that I felt I was pushing against and resisting and that wasn’t helping me. What if I did the opposite and just surrendered, I wondered. I had an unexpected situation come up where exercising this value was very helpful. On Tuesday, I was PMSing heavily and my thoughts were spiraling out of control. The next day, I woke up feeling nauseous and sick. I could do little else other than surrender. That was really helpful in uplifting my spirits and getting me out of my spiraling thoughts. I had a breakthrough with an approach to work I was vehemently resisting. I did not recognize how hard I was pushing until I decided to just – stop. When I did so, I could almost feel space opening up in my mind and a solution began to emerge. Within a few days, I had completely mapped out a better, more aligned, joyful approach which I’ve already started implementing. This got me thinking that we often see surrender as a passive thing that doesn’t lead to real results or solutions. At least I did. But that’s not true at all. Surrender means stopping the energy drain that goes into resisting something. When you do that, it creates space. The saved energy can then be channeled into things that don’t have as much resistance. I also surrendered to my yearning for travel and booked flight tickets to Sri Lanka for a vacation. I’ll be traveling from the 2nd until the 13th. I feel so excited just thinking about it! I already know what my value for that week’s going to be! 😉 Overall, the week was a great success. It was one of those values that came along exactly at a moment I needed it the most. Week #48 Until Thursday, I hadn’t ever paid attention to the word moxie. I wasn’t sure what I wanted the value for the week to be and I set the intention for it to present itself in a way I’d instantly know it. I was listening to an interview of Whitney Wolfe Herd with Tim Ferriss and she said that she’d initially wanted to name Bumble ‘Moxie’. I was like, that’s it. Moxie. It’s not an oft-used word and it can either be used as ‘energy or pep’ or as ‘courage or determination’. I love it. As I’ve been going about this values challenge, I’ve been thinking about my top 3-4 values for every area of my life. It occurred to me that moxie would certainly apply to who Ranjana is, at a personality level. In terms of how I want to apply this, I am going to embody this value in whatever way feels good or right to me. I’ll share the different ways this value showed up in my review! [...] Read more...
I really enjoyed the experiment of setting 100+ intentions per day. I experimented with different ways of saying the intention, just to see if some ways landed better than others. I experimented with different ways of summoning intentions too; sometimes just writing down any intention that popped up without thinking and some other times seeing if I could deliberately set nuanced intentions in specific areas such as work, motivation, health, fun, and so on. Here’s how setting intentions consciously for a week impacted me: It helped me become intentional about how I spent my days.It helped me understand the sorts of intentions I have at this point in time. I could see the patterns and themes. That created greater self-awareness.It changed how I felt. I felt more optimistic, lighter, and energized. It made me feel inspired by connecting me to possibilities.It gave me direction from moment to moment and helped me focus. I found myself not running negative thought patterns as often. Setting intentions still feels like a new skill. It took a significant amount of time to write the 100 intentions every day. I see the importance of setting intentions multiple times a day so I plan to keep this going. For now, I’ve settled on writing 20 intentions during my end-of-day journaling and set intentions in my mind or out loud several times during the day. I also have a piece of paper with the question, “What’s your intention?” on my work table as a reminder. Week #46 – Assurance One of the themes that were predominant among my intentions was the deep desire to feel confident in myself, who I am, the story I’m living, and the certainty in the path I’ve chosen for myself. I find that sometimes I tend to get a bit shaky about myself or what I’m doing. Or I might look at how someone else is living their life and start questioning if I should be doing more or doing other things. While there’s merit in evaluating myself and the direction I’ve picked now and then, regular self-doubt and uncertainty do more harm than good. I’d like to use this week to keep setting the intention to be in a state of mind where I feel certain about myself, my story, and my abilities. In other words, I want to be in a state of assurance. I’m particularly curious to see how holding an intention to feel assured will influence my experience of reality and myself this week. I’m going to keep a lookout for external signs as well as pay attention to the internal shifts. [...] Read more...
I’ve realised that September through November is a morose time of the year for me usually (a pattern I’d like to change). Perhaps the season has a part to play and the grey skies do dampen my spirits. It feels harder to get myself to do even those things that I know I’ll enjoy. Anyway, all that was to say that while I have been keeping up with my exploration and journaling about it, I haven’t had the motivation to put pen to paper and write this post. Until now. We are on week #45 now, so I’m going to cover weeks 41 through 44 one by one below: Week #41 – Strength It actually turned out to be a difficult week for me. I heard some news that made me stop and question the choices I made and the path I decided to tread over the past two years. Having the intention to strengthen only those thought patterns that empowered me was helpful. I reminded myself, daily, that choosing to live my own story is far more important than any external validation. I read a quote by Adam Grant around the same time which goes like this: “Outer prestige is rarely a justification for inner misery.” I needed to read that and it made me feel so much better. I came out of the week feeling better about myself and my thought patterns reset from the negative spiral I had been on somewhat. I definitely felt the week was a success in that regard. Week #42 – Faith I felt a need to hold onto faith that week. The faith that I’m going to be okay no matter what. Faith that I was on the right track. Faith that better things were coming. I held these two quotes at the back of my mind throughout the week: “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark”– Rabindranath Tagore and Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step”.– Martin Luther King I decided that the best way to reinforce this value was to create a coloring book on faith. My thought process was that perhaps others would appreciate having an affirmation coloring book that reminds them to have faith too. So I did that. It was interesting spending so much time holding this value in my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. This value is more abstract than others, so I was experiencing it more as a feeling than as thoughts. It certainly made the experience of my week better especially because I was otherwise not in a great frame of mind. Week #43 – Imagination I have a tendency to hold myself back from indulging in imaginative thinking if I think that it won’t aid a project I’m currently working on. This basically means that I feel guilty when I do allow myself to daydream and consider future scenarios or projects. I wanted to use a week to remedy this line of thinking because I intellectually know that there’s nothing wrong with imaginative thinking and I needn’t feel guilty about indulging in it. It was a fun value to explore. I found it interesting to observe the directions my mind went in. Most revolved around what I’d like my life to mean, what I’d like to create, and how I’d like to add value to humanity and the planet. I journaled about this which was helpful and something I’m going to keep referring back to. I read a book called Meant for this by Erica Wernick which was a great listen during this time. I came out of the week feeling more energized and joyful. I think that’s because my mind finally got to indulge in something it wanted to but wasn’t being allowed to. Week #44 – Motivation I usually select values to reflect the sort of week I’d like to experience. Since I was going to participate in the Octo Intensive Workshop by Steve Pavlina which was on self-motivation, I decided that I’d make the week about motivation. After three days of being immersed in the topic, I found that it was fairly easy to keep my focus on motivation the rest of the week. I just started re-listening to the whole thing again yesterday. Honestly, there is so much great material that I think it will take me a bit of time to digest and integrate all the insights that I thought were gold for me. If there’s one thing that’s shifted in how I view motivation, it’s this: I have started looking at it as a skill to cultivate rather than something that’s just there or isn’t. Week #45 The first of the eight keys to self-motivation discussed in the workshop was intention. I don’t think I’ve ever paid attention to this value for more than a few minutes at a time. I’m eager to explore it in an extended way for a week. As Steve explains it, intentions expire fairly quickly. So it’s important to keep setting intentions afresh – even setting a hundred intentions a day isn’t too much. I’d like to use this week to make intention-setting a habit. I’m going to set 100+ intentions a day. If possible, I’ll try to do it in multiple ways: writing, saying them out loud, and thinking them consciously. It’s hard to keep count, so I’m going to make sure that the ones I write are at least 100 in number. So it’s likely that I will set way more than 100 intentions daily. I’m curious what such an exercise will teach me or lead to. It’s often hard to predict any sort of outcome with this sort of subjective exploration. [...] Read more...
Keeping this value at the back of my mind simplifies things, for the most part, I found. How I should act in a particular scenario becomes clear because I don’t have the leeway to act out of alignment with my own boundaries and rules. Now, I’m not saying that extenuating circumstances shouldn’t be taken into account. In most cases, though, there are no extenuating circumstances and we are just indulging in self-betrayal. If at any point I found that different parts of me weren’t in agreement, I would listen to each part and then make a decision based on what being a person with integrity would dictate. For example, if I really felt like checking Instagram while working, I’d acknowledge the part of me that wanted the dopamine hit but come to an agreement with myself to not go through with the action because integrity would say that work time is for work. On another occasion, I was particularly tired after a night of getting less than restful sleep. A part of me wanted to push through and go to the gym but after checking in with myself, I realised that I needed to honour my need for rest and decided to do yoga at home instead. My promise to myself was that I’d exercise for 45 minutes that day so while I ensured that that happened, I also ensured that I was in sync with what my body was telling me. Seeing integrity as different parts of me being in harmony is an interesting as well as a useful lens. It’s a keeper! Week #41 – Strength Much like integrity, I’m seeing strength in the usual sense of the word as well as from a different lens. Over the past week, I noticed that some old thought patterns that no longer serve me were beginning to creep back in again. I want to use this week to show myself that I’m stronger than these old patterns and won’t succumb to them. I’ll do that by strengthening the neural patterns that tell a more empowering story. So while I will be practising strength in the usual sense of ‘the emotional or mental qualities necessary in dealing with difficult or distressing situations’, I will also be using this as an opportunity to lend strength to the thoughts that will serve me that aren’t yet strong. In a way, this is a mental workout I’ll be doing daily, to retrain my brain. When I catch myself thinking old, disempowering thoughts, I’ll redirect them to the new, more empowering thoughts. I’ll also spend the first few minutes of the day deliberately going through the beliefs and thought patterns I want to be reinforcing (I have them in a specific journal entry I created a couple of months ago). While there are many of them, I’m going to be focusing on one particular belief, which is that I’m the protagonist of my own story and am creating the hero’s journey that most makes sense for my character. [...] Read more...
I got more rest this week than I have in the past several weeks (individually, not collectively haha). I slept for more than nine hours almost on a daily basis. I still feel like there’s a sleep deficit, though, so I’m going to continue prioritising sleep this week. In fact, I just finished working on my Q4 plans, and getting adequate sleep is right on top of my list of goals. I aim to make eight hours of sleep on a daily basis a non-negotiable. I have been listening to Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. I figured that if I’m going to be taking sleep seriously, I might as well read a book about it. I’m curious to understand the science behind sleep and why we need it. Week 40 – Integrity When I Googled the word, the following definitions showed up: the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.the state of being whole and undivided. My process of going about picking a value every Thursday evening or Friday morning is this: I think about the sort of week I’d like to experience (both externally and internally) and let the answer intuitively come up. Then I think about the value that would most help me have such an experience and run with it. I focus on the sort of gut-level reaction I have to the sound of a particular value. If there’s deep resonance at an emotional level, if I feel a sense of rightness, I run with it. This morning, I felt like I wanted to experience a week where the various parts of me worked together in harmony. I wanted to feel whole – like there was one voice guiding me as opposed to several opposing ones. I also wanted to feel like I was living in a way that honored my own boundaries and I didn’t betray myself. Integrity captured the essence of what I wanted beautifully. Every day, I’m going to think about how I can practice this value in my life. I might choose to journal about it if I wish to. I mostly see myself taking action in accordance with this value, whatever that might look like. I’m going to keep a log of what that looks like. [...] Read more...