Guru Shankar Muthu Raj

Guru Shankar grew up moving every three years, wherever his father’s bank sent the family next. Villages, towns and cities across Tamil Nadu, and once to a neighbouring state. He thought he was collecting places. It took him thirty eight years to notice he had been collecting speeds.

He moved to the United States in his mid twenties and worked there for five years, then spent a year near Toronto. In the covid years, with their daughter on the way, he and his wife sold everything, let go, and moved back to India so she would be born with her grandmothers in the room. He has since returned to the United States, which makes about a decade there across two stretches. He lives in Connecticut, works full time in IT, loves technology, and writes and blogs in the quiet hours after everyone at home has gone to sleep.

Village and city. India, Canada and America. A grandfather’s weighing scale and a line of code. He has seen life from a good many sides and met people from many parts of the world. What he kept noticing was how much they all had in common, and how no two of them were the same.

He has always been drawn to spirituality, simple living and the middle path. The sages and gurus of India have shaped his thinking, Ramana Maharshi above all, and so have the Buddha and the Zen masters. He has read a long shelf of Western self help and motivation too, and found something true in both and his own name on neither. What stayed with him was the ordinary man who wanted very little, did his duty seriously and took life lightly.

The Man Who Never Hurried, his first book, is about the man he knew best: his grandfather, a grocer in Madurai who never once hurried. It gives no advice. It only shares what one man noticed, in chapters like Effortless Effort and Unattached Attachment, and leaves the rest to the reader.