Aritra Sarkar: What If Loneliness Is Trying to Teach Us Something?
Over coffee in Kolkata, the author of Are You Lonesome? spoke about failure, spirituality, gratitude and why our deepest voids may be invitations to grow.
By Antara Mohan
Have you ever wondered what loneliness is trying to tell you?
Not the loneliness of an empty room, but the kind that quietly follows us through crowded days. The kind we hide behind work, endless scrolling, comfort food and polite smiles. We spend so much of our lives trying to escape it. But what if loneliness is not asking to be escaped? What if it is trying to teach us something?
That question stayed with me long after I met author Aritra Sarkar over coffee in Kolkata.
Our conversation began with books and the city we both love. It wandered into spirituality, gratitude and eventually loneliness. Somewhere between those conversations, I forgot I was interviewing him. I was simply listening. What struck me most was how unassuming he was. There was no hurry in his words, no desire to impress. Just a quiet, grounded man who had made peace with life’s many twists.
His own story is proof of that.
Born into a Bengali joint family, Aritra grew up listening to his grandmother’s stories and reading classics like Thakurmar Jhuli. A school writing competition in Class 10 gave him his first taste of storytelling. He later studied Mathematics in the United States, where philosophy and creative writing quietly shaped the writer in him. A career on Wall Street followed, before he left everything behind to build a social media company that connected people through shared passions.
Nine years later, that dream came to an end. Around the same time, his marriage was falling apart.
He did what writers often do. He wrote.
His debut novel, Goliath of Shenzhen, was followed by Soulful Cal, a heartfelt tribute to Kolkata and the everyday people who give the city its character. The muriwala, the istriwala, roadside vendors and countless familiar faces all found a place in its pages. Then came From Stress to Zest, written during one of the most difficult phases of his life. It was this book, he told me, that helped him discover his voice.
One reader wrote to him saying, “Your book made me feel like I had somebody with me.”
That message stayed with him and eventually led to Are You Lonesome?
As he spoke about the book, I realised he wasn’t trying to tell people how to get rid of loneliness. He spoke about the different voids we carry. The void of friendship. The void of connection. The void of companionship. The void of guidance. The void of intimacy. His question was never, “How do we fill these spaces?” It was, “How do we grow because of them?”
When I asked him what spirituality had taught him, I expected him to say it had taught him to look within.
Instead, he smiled.
“It has taught me to look.”
It was such a simple answer, yet perhaps the wisest one I heard that afternoon.
Before leaving, I asked him how he hoped people would remember him.
“As someone who had his way with the green and shared some tips along the way.”
It was a golfer’s metaphor, but it said everything about the man sitting across from me. No talk of fame. No talk of success. Just the hope that his journey might make someone else’s a little easier.
I walked out of that café thinking that perhaps loneliness is not something to fear.
Perhaps it is simply waiting for us to listen.
