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Rakesh Kumar Prajapati
Rakesh Kumar Prajapati owes his values to his late grandfather, a farmer, and his discipline to his father, a retired soldier of the Indian Army. Both inheritances are visible in the life that followed.
He is a dual graduate in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering from BITS Pilani, with a stint at INSEAD, Fontainebleau. He joined the Indian Administrative Service on his first attempt and has served for over a decade, earning recognition from the President of India for his contributions to public service. During the Covid-19 pandemic, India Today counted him among its ‘New Action Heroes’.
Lighter than Yesterday is his first novel. It follows Jai, who pursues a dream inherited from his grandfather, clears one of the country’s toughest examinations, enters the Administrative Service — and then discovers, in the quiet that follows, that the question has not gone away. His writing is shaped by Eastern thought and Western existentialism in roughly equal measure. He has described the book as a meditation on awakening.
My grandfather was a farmer. He believed something about me before I was old enough to agree to it, and I have spent most of my life carrying that belief carefully, the way you carry something that belongs to someone else.
My father was a soldier. From him I learned that discipline is not enthusiasm. It is what remains after enthusiasm has gone.
Between them I was given a dream and the means to chase it. I cleared the examination on my first attempt. For more than ten years I have served, and signed things that changed lives, and been thanked in rooms I could not have imagined as a boy.
And still, in the quiet of an ordinary evening, a question would arrive that none of it could answer.
This book is not my life, and Jai is not me. But that question is mine. I wrote four hundred and forty-eight pages because I could not answer it in fewer, and because I suspect I am not the only one who has heard it and had nowhere to put it.
If you have, this book is for you.
— RAKESH KUMAR PRAJAPATI