Meet Sakshi, Nritya & Kiran (🇮🇳/🇺🇸)

Please introduce yourself; who are you, where are you from, where are you currently, what do you do for a living/currently? Please include the kids’ ages on departure day.

We are Nritya Kamath, Kiran Pathakota, and Sakshi Kamath (2 yrs, 4 months on departure day). 

Nritya grew up in Bengaluru, India (the tech capital of the country). She’s a supply chain and logistics specialist. 

Kiran was born in the United States and moved to Bengaluru, India when he was 11. He specializes in Technical Program Management and is currently consulting with companies to help them plan and execute on their software products. 

Our first combined home was in Seattle, WA, USA and we like to think of ourselves as being split between Bengaluru, IN, and Seattle, USA. 

We moved from Seattle to Bangalore almost two years ago, just before Sakshi was born. A few months ago, we decided to fulfill a dream of ours and take a year off to travel around. This year we’re planning on focusing on the Americas, and hopefully some of Europe. 

For the record, constantly switching narrator/pronoun is a challenge in this intro, so please assume when “Nritya” is being referred to, it’s Kiran doing the narrating and vice versa. Sakshi (our one-year-old) speaks for herself.

Why did you decide to get involved in this project?

Kiran is always on Twitter and one day he saw a crazy idea that he thought just might work. Travelling gets lonely and though we have great friends in pockets of the USA and India, it’s not possible to take them all with you. Digital connection is great but in this physical world, it would be so incredible to have a community that shares in the experience as we travel the world. We also had a sense that regular school wasn’t right for our daughter. While we enjoyed school enough, we believe there are phenomenal alternatives today unlocked by more free time (for us parents) and more access to resources through the internet. We want to see if we can make homeschooling and/or worldschooling work and this is going to be an incredible crash course and testing ground for us. 

The other reason of course was meeting Nikolaj and seeing the excitement around this project from the other founding families. Their passion is infectious and their competence in building makes us believe this will be one for the ages.

What kind of interests do you have?

As a family, we love walking around and exploring new places. We love Sci-Fi and Fantasy books (Brandon Sanderson has become our go-to author of late). Snowboarding became a passion of ours in Seattle and we recently picked up Surfing (interests we hope to share with Sakshi once she’s older). There are times that we’ve binge-watched shows (like Great British Bake Off or New Girl) but sadly we can only watch episodes one or two at a time these days. 

Kiran gets obsessed with various sports but Basketball (and watching the NBA) has been his passion of late. He also had a brief obsession with Disc Golf in college. He’s really into esoteric blogs, newsletters, and talking about historical politics. 

Nritya is a fan of food, baking, and movies. She usually methodically plans out which restaurants we need to go to and has an insatiable sweet tooth. 

I, Sakshi, first of my name, enjoy lights, fans, and the way switches can turn on lights and fans. I also enjoy peek-a-boo but not when I’m too hungry or tired. I’m a specialist at exploring the world through the wonderful sense of taste and specifically appreciate the way paper turns to cud in my mouth.

Tell us some interesting random facts about you guys. Don’t hold back, this is your time to shine 🙂

First random fact is I met Nritya in middle school. Second random fact, we’ve known each other for over 60% of our lives AND we’ve been *ahem* romantically involved for over 60% of the time we’ve known each other. 

We once played the Indian version of Romeo and Juliet (Devdas and Paro) for a school play. 

Sakshi’s name started out as an inside joke between the two of us. After our first ultrasound where only the fetal yolk sac was visible, we started referring to her as the little “sac”. One day, Nritya woke up and exclaimed “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we named her Sakshi? Coz it sounds like sac.” We weren’t seriously considering it at first but we ended up loving the name so it stuck, and the Sak was born!

Kiran was a reality TV show runner-up in high school. He thought it made him way cooler than he actually was.

How do you educate your kids?

We haven’t started any of the formal subjects yet! However, Sakshi does seem to learn a lot from observation. We used to think most kids learn by trial and error but Sakshi seems to watch, watch, watch until she’s sure she can do something before she even attempts it.

What do you think will be the most difficult about this experiment?

Striking the right balance between social life, family life and work has been a challenge and we’d expect it to continue to be a challenge. Kiran has professional goals but those have been taking a backseat while we travel.

What kind of work groups or projects would you be excited about joining on the trip?

Kiran just starting to get into Breathwork and calisthenics so a group that organizes fitness activities would be fun for him. He also taught drumming for many years so I could see him enjoying running music classes for the kids. 

Nritya loves planning meals (and is a Supply Chain and Operations wizard) so she’ll probably get involved with the logistics of the community meals.

Will you be working while we are traveling?

Kiran is getting a consulting practice off the ground so *hopefully* he will be working (<20 hours a week). 

Nritya will likely not be working, because she’s enjoying the freedom of NotWork too much. This could change but there’s not something calling out to her yet.

What do you hope to learn or take away from joining this experiment?

Making lasting memories is a core principle for our family and we hope to make many memories like that here. We also hope to experiment with a way of living and working that could potentially sustain itself over many years. We want to put more of what we want to see into the world and we think this way of living and traveling, respecting cultures, and creating our own traditions has been an important human activity in the past and will be very important for the future. 

Overall, we just hope to have a great time with wonderful people!