Aradhye Ackshatt is an alumnus of the Lawrence School, Sanawar, Delhi College of Engineering (now DTU), and Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi University. Weaving words is his passion and profession. He is part of the core marketing team at Instahyre, a B2B SaaS startup focused on AI-based tech talent recruitment for Fortune 500 companies and Indian unicorns, both present and future. He lives in Noida. His book A Life Afloat is a travelogue, and for him, this first-person travel-framed narrative is a bildungsroman.

I chat with him about his book A Life Afloat, interesting anecdotes from his travels, book recommendations, and much more.

Hello, Aradhye! Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m an existential humanist from Patna, Bihar. I envision humankind as a spacefaring species, and I foster the use of technology for improving lives of the less-privileged during our lifetime.

Which authors and books were your early formative influences?

At the Lawrence School, Sanawar, I devoured encyclopaedias and the classics of Western literature, while at home in the holidays I read Amar Chitra Katha and Tintin, as well as our expansive mythos.

In college, I expanded my reading to the Western canon, Carl Sagan’s oeuvre, and Robert Pirsig’s standout book (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), while keeping Douglas Adams and JRR Tolkien as light reading companions.

If you could only describe your book ‘A Life Afloat’ in five words, what would they be?

Existentialist philosophy framed by travelogues.

Now tell us a little more about the book! What can readers expect?

I have been on the road (very unlike Jack Kerouac, though) since childhood, and those experiences have shaped much of my thinking. Readers can revisit their own childhood and young adult memories via my reminiscences, and perhaps relate to some of my travels across India, right from Himalayas in the north to Kanyakumari in the south.

Can you tell us some of the interesting anecdotes from your travels, which find a place in this book?

The undercurrent is the unpredictability of a traveller’s life, like how we helped a family travelling in an Audi with their burst tyre during our Ladakh road trip, and that same Audi paving a way for us when snow started falling at Tanglang La as night fell further up the road.

Keeping a positive outlook, a traveller can find joy and companionship in the most unexpected places and people. My book is not just about being afloat in space, going from place to place, but in the mind, too.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading this book?

My fervent hope is that readers will not only be inspired to level up their reading game while reading A Life Afloat (I have not pulled any punches with either the vocabulary or the grammatical gymnastics), but also look at life in a brighter way, and create a brilliant future.

How have you been coping with the current pandemic and what will be the new normal for you post it?

Since I was always a traveller, I found it slightly difficult to curtail my itinerant tendencies, but by being precautious and maintaining high discipline, we (my wife and I) got through Lockdown 1.0 very nicely.

Thereafter, we made a one-day trip to the Taj Mahal, which yielded a rare experience – an almost-empty Monument of Love! Great photos.

Then we went for a week to my school friend’s orchard in Sirmaur, Himachal Pradesh. That trip marked the resumption of the new normal for us, although we have certainly eliminated non-essential outings and continue to maintain our usual sanitization procedures.

What are you reading currently? Do you have any book recommendations for readers who enjoyed ‘A Life Afloat’?

I just finished Ikigai, which is a great book about being happy. The basic concept of the factors that contribute most to your “reason for being,” or raison d'etre, fits in quite well with my personal philosophy of 6hourism, which I have explained in A Life Afloat. So I recco A Life Afloat and Ikigai to readers who are (understandably) unsatisfied with the frankly low-brow pulp fiction that passes for Indian ‘literature’ ever since Chetan Bhagat made it ‘cool’ for well-educated people to churn out lame books. I strongly feel that they are detrimental to the mental states of Indians and erode the quality of Indian youth’s minds.

Given the current state of easily available gratuitous OTT content and the lack of mind-encouraging food for thought, I try to steer young minds towards constructive nourishment while I can do so. Thanks!

The book ‘A Life Afloat’ is available online and at your nearest bookstore.