Hello,

I'm Akshit. I live in Bengaluru, where I freelance as a product manager, which is a reasonable way to describe how I pay for things and a poor way to describe how I spend my attention.

The attention mostly goes two places. One is fiction — I've been building a thriller for longer than I'd like to admit, and I've learned that a novel is less an act of inspiration than an act of scaffolding. The other is distance. I run long, climb when I can, and have spent a fair amount of my adult life walking uphill and running back down, mostly in weather that would advise against it.

Those two things look unrelated. They aren't. Both are mostly about staying with something after the initial enthusiasm has worn off — which is, as far as I can tell, the only skill that has ever mattered to me.

I write a weekly dispatch called Thoughts in Knots. It's where the actual thinking happens: on craft, on mountains, on the strange arithmetic of building a life in the margins of a job. Recent issues are listed below.

Before all this I studied quantum physics, in a lab full of lasers doing things that will not become commercially useful in our lifetimes. I still do the maths, out of curiosity rather than obligation. What stayed with me from those years was entropy — the principle that everything tends toward disorder unless energy is continuously spent holding it together. It explains most things in my life: manuscripts, fitness, and above all, relationships.

I've been vegan since 2020, which was not a covid epiphany. It started as sentiment and survived becoming an argument. I live with a six-year-old rescued Labrador called James, whose story is here, and who is unmoved by all of the above and would like to go for a walk now. So, excuse me.

You can reach me at akshit@akshitkumar.com. I'm glad you're here.

Akshit