Rajat Kukreja, 37, dreads one monthly task more than any deadline. As an ecosystem builder in climate technology, he travels constantly, and the reimbursements pile up with every trip. Each expense must then be entered into a rigid Excel format his institution insists on. His five teammates get through it in an hour or two.

Rajat never could. “Everyone in the team would just do it in one or two hours, and I would almost cry when I did it. I used to breathe very heavily and tell them it feels like somebody is taking my soul away. Everyone thought I was joking, and I really used to feel it. At that point, I used to wonder why I was not able to do this,” he says.

For most of his life, Rajat had a ready answer to that question. He was simply a restless, impulsive person, he told himself, who lost things and moved on quickly. It took a project failure at work, a marriage, and a stretch of sleepless months to show him that this answer was incomplete. That story begins with the years when he still believed it.

The man who kept hopping

Rajat has always felt out of step with others, and he explained the feeling away as personality. “I always had a sense that I am differently wired, and I attributed that to my personality,” he says.

Even a business he named ‘Cuckoo’, which did well, came from that instinct. “It was just my ADHD traits expressing themselves. I wanted to create a space which was non-neurotypical, but back then I did not have the right words for it,” he says.

That instinct shaped his career too. He spent two years in a small village as part of the Gandhi Fellowship, stayed in rural development for a long time, moved into environmental work, and later joined a sustainability-focused travel company.

Each new field pulled him in completely, and each one lost its hold just as quickly. “I could hyperfocus and saturate myself with everything I could learn about a domain in a very short period of time, unlike others around me. But I was also feeling satiated very soon,” he says.

That speed did not go unnoticed. Others saw someone who kept hopping from jobs to cities and, in many eyes, relationships too, so Rajat surveyed those close to him and wrote down what they thought. “I knew there was something, but I did not have the word,” he says.

Meanwhile, he was arranging his life around his senses without quite realising it, staying away from big cities for over a decade and moving between Goa, which he calls home, Himachal and places like rural Thailand.

“I hypothesize that it came from being too sensitive to stimulation all the time. When I lived next to the beach and felt a little low, I would just go for a swim and come........

© The Better India