New Delhi: Kunal Bhardwaj felt the wind cut through his bones while his leg muscles strained against the snow as he ran in the coldest place on earth—Antarctica. But Bhardwaj, 43, wasn’t running a marathon in the Antarctic circle to conquer the elements. He was running headfirst toward acceptance of his childhood trauma, and his identity as an openly gay man. From Lima to New York, he’s the first gay man in the world to run marathons on all seven continents, with a pride flag marking his official finish.
Bhardwaj’s final frontier was Antarctica, a 42.2-kilometre run he completed in December in sub-zero temperatures between speedy gusts of wind. It entailed pushing his body to its fullest, with every nerve ending at odds with the climate. He’s 20 kg lighter than what he was when he started training for it.
“There was 24-hour sun, and the wind kept bringing in fresh ice. I needed to be lighter,” says Kunal, now in the easier climes of South Delhi’s Defence Colony.
He didn’t intend for it to happen, but both of Kunal Bhardwaj’s life-affirming expeditions—challenging his body and society—began at the same time. He came out of the closet in 2018, publicly accepting his identity as a gay man, and began running. Running for fitness, running as meditation and finally, running for what has defined all four decades of his life.
Bhardwaj was a different person in 2018. A stray comment at work led him to confront his childhood sexual trauma, triggering a volley of emotions and the realisation of his sexuality. After a lot of therapy and unrelenting support from friends and family, he could take on anything. Even something as formidable as Antarctica.
There’s nothing in India that mimics the freezing winds and overall inhospitable atmosphere of Antarctica. His ‘trial run’ was at a marathon in Iceland, before which he found himself running on Juhu Beach in Mumbai. The sand posed a challenge similar to snow.
On 13 December 2023, the day of the marathon, he wore a jacket hand-painted by a friend, a deluge of rainbow colours depicting a runner with a seven-coloured cape.
The image makes sense for what Kunal is attempting to do, and what a lot of runners, more so in the West, where marathon culture has a longer history, do. He’s combining passion, profession, and a social cause close to his heart. The aim is to influence change and integrate a queer-affirmative philosophy into mainstream spaces, all under a corporate umbrella.
His first order of business is to paint corporate India and its boardrooms in rainbow colours. It’s one of many spaces where homophobic jokes and slurs are thrown around casually, where anti-women and anti-LGBTQIA+ microaggressions are part of common parlance. As a partner at The Rainmaker Group, a Delhi-based sales advisory for tech companies, he’s put this into practice at work.
“There aren’t enough corporate leaders who are gay in India,” he says.
Confronting abuse, coming out
Kunal Bhardwaj came out at the age of 36. A finance professional, he was in a meeting when a member of senior management told someone: “I’ll rape you if you don’t finish this task on time.” The comment jolted him, making him confront the sexual abuse he encountered in his childhood and acknowledge his identity as a gay man.
Therapy-speak is now part of the popular lexicon, but even a decade ago, triggers were seldom understood – let alone articulated as triggers. The American Psychological Association defines the term as “a stimulus that elicits a reaction. For example, an event could be a trigger for a memory of a past experience and an accompanying state of emotional arousal.”
For Kunal, it brought back memories of sexual abuse that occurred while he was in boarding school.
“I was in an Army school and I had suppressed the trauma. Once I acknowledged it, there was a fear of correspondence [with the school]. But I wanted closure,” he says.
The confrontation of his trauma also coincided with the acceptance of his sexual identity. He contacted the school, and found them to be forthcoming — they didn’t deny what had happened. He told his family and opened up to close friends.
“Telling my family and friends was a journey by itself. My father asked why I didn’t tell him. He told me that he would have protected me,” he says. “They [friends and family] were supportive, but there were conversations among my larger social circle. People were talking about me behind my back.”
One of Kunal’s childhood friends, Barkha Bajaj, a psychologist who specialises in childhood and family trauma, attended the same school. No one knew what Kunal had been going through. “He never told us anything at all,” says Bajaj, who had a far sunnier school life in comparison.
“It’s difficult to imagine that we went to the same school, but had such diagrammatically opposite experiences,” she says. “Ordinarily, you’d assume this would happen to girls. But we were so insulated.”
Childhood sexual abuse, taking place at school and home, is not an uncommon phenomenon. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)’s 2020 data, “approximately 28.9 per cent of the entire child population experienced some form of sexual crime.”
But Bajaj, founder of a mental-health centre in Pune called Unalome, says that “it goes rampant and unchecked in boarding schools.” She’s found that at “big boarding schools in India”, there’s a higher percentage of boys who have faced this category of abuse.
As part of Bhardwaj’s attempts to foray into the world of LGBTQIA+ activism, he wants to address sexual trauma at schools. He’s discussed it with friends who have children, asking them whether they’d be comfortable with him going to their schools and talking about his trauma. They’ve been reluctant, for the most part. “It’s also about what age you can have these conversations,” he says, adding that it also depends on the school.
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Battling bias
Over the last 19 years, Bhardwaj has worked in the sales departments of big companies, overseeing large teams. People would ask him frequently whether he was married. Now, his personal policy is to be direct about his sexuality. When he tells colleagues he’s gay, there’s inevitably “a moment of awkwardness.”
“They get stuck on my physical features. They begin to scrutinise my appearance. They look at my mannerisms, and focus on how I am conducting myself,” he says.
But he has yet to come across an openly gay co-worker or manager. In the finance world, sexuality is a taboo subject, discussed covertly.
The expectation is that since he’s gay, he’d have certain effeminate traits. While this typecasting was jarring initially, he is undeterred. “I believe in taking the bull by its horns. In addressing the issue there and then.”
Kunal’s physical appearance is heteronormative in every way, if not more so, given the gruelling workout schedule he follows in order to train for his marathons. But even then, he was witness to changes in expression, subtle shifts in behaviour, and doubts about his competency as a “corporate leader.”
Very few companies in India have policies to ensure an LGBTQIA+friendly workplace. “If you spend 12-15 hours in the office every day, how can they [co-workers] not know about your sexuality?” he asks.
This is probably why Bhardwaj’s activism is steeped in Linkedin — it’s all about diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the workspace, queer-affirmative employers, and the need for allies at work. He hasn’t found too many allies, but Aditya Ghosh, former CEO of IndiGo airlines and the co-founder of Akasa Air, has been unequivocal in his support. Bhardwaj worked with Ghosh at the hospitality chain OYO, and the coming-out process became less daunting thanks to the latter’s solidarity.
“Had the most wonderful two hours this evening with an amazingly bright, hardworking courageous young man Kunal Bhardwaj who used to be a colleague of mine a few years ago,” reads a Linkedin post by Ghosh.” I was fortunate to be an #ally to #KunalBhardwaj as he was coming out as #Gay and dealing with one of the toughest phases of his life.”
Accompanying the post is a photograph of the two holding up a book titled The Queer Bible, a compilation of essays by multiple famous “gay icons” from Elton John to Queer Eye’s Tan France. There are about 20 hashtags as well, permutations and combinations of “D&I” and “LGBTQ”. It’s gayness at its productive and performative best.
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Corporate India’s rainbow warrior
As Bhardwaj announced his last marathon on Instagram, it made a splash on Linkedin too. The who’s who of corporate India, such as Rishabh Mariwala of Marico and Sridhar Balakrishnan of Duroflex, congratulated him. “I hope this achievement builds further on efforts to mainstream conversations around the community in India. Love is love…” Bhardwaj wrote. The tone of the post is in tune with Linkedin’s personality — the writing is stilted, and the overarching message is that everything can, and needs to be, optimised.
According to Kunal, the West has its fair share of unabashedly gay corporate leaders, comfortable in their success and sexuality. Apple CEO Tim Cook said he “felt a tremendous responsibility” to come out. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, told the audience at a Republican convention in 2016: “I am proud to be gay.” According to an NPR report, it was the first such statement at a Republican convention.
India, on the other hand, has a long way to go.
“I understand that over here, we’re still working on equal rights for women at work,” says Bhardwaj.
Marathons are also a distinctly corporate space, the chosen philanthropic arena for some of India’s key players. It’s where they raise money for charities and advocate for causes. The Delhi Half Marathon is sponsored by Airtel. The Mumbai Marathon was helmed by Standard Chartered and then taken over by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in 2017.
The next time Bhardwaj runs, he would like to have corporate sponsors so that he can provide funding to certain LGBTQIA+ trusts and mental health NGOs. “I don’t have a lot, but whatever little I do have, I’d like to give to the cause,” he says earnestly.
The Tata Mumbai Marathon, due to be held later this January, is special to Bhardwaj. He has run it four times — in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2023. But he doesn’t know if he’s going to participate this time. Bhardwaj is still in recovery mode, recuperating from his most recent stint in Antarctica. However, his mind is still working in a slow, deliberate jog.
“How can I make the journey of coming out easier for good people?” he wonders.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)