New Delhi: A few years ago, when he was working in Mumbai, Akhileshwar Sahay learnt that he had won a Nobel Prize. As he drove home that day, he saw congratulatory posters lining his route, all emblazoned with his face and gushing with accolades. This was why, he told his family, Amitabh Bachchan would soon host a special episode of Kaun Banega Crorepati, quizzing contestants on the details of Sahay’s life. Then he sat back to watch himself on the evening news.
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Except, of course, none of this had actually happened. His delusions of Nobel glory were part of Sahay’s second of two severe manic attacks, registered over what have now been 12 years of a life with bipolar disorder. This was the attack, Sahay says, that yanked him out of denial and returned him to his medication. It was also the start of his personal glasnost, an openness with his colleagues and clients about his bipolar disorder, rarely found among working professionals with mental illnesses.
Career concern: Sahay has been fortunate to have supportive employers. Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint
Sahay, a stocky man of 50, is the director of the transportation division at Feedback Ventures, a Gurgaon-based infrastructure services firm where he has worked since 2002. He is a voluble, entrancing speaker, easy to converse with, but difficult to interrupt. His fingers, as they light one of the many cigarettes he smokes each day, quiver with a barely perceptible tremor—a possible side effect of sodium valproate, his primary medication, but perhaps also a sign of his high nervous energy. “I’m a very impatient person,” he says.
Sahay always had vast reservoirs of energy. In his early 20s, he worked night shifts at a telegraph office in Patna and studied during the day for his master’s in mathematics. After his degree, he worked first at State Bank of India and then, having missed entering the civil services “by a whisker”, in the accounts division of Indian Railways.
From 1991 to 1997, he was on deputation to the Konkan Railway Corp. Ltd, almost single-handedly responsible for mobilizing funds for four of those years. “I worked 18- or 20-hour days,” he says. “Sometimes, I would go a week or 10 days without any sleep at all.”
At the time, there was no obvious sign of the trouble to come, although in retrospect Sahay thinks those four years were one long phase of hypomania—a mood more manic than normal, but not dangerously so, often associated with riffs of outstanding creativity.
Disruptive worst