The Great Soul Crossing: Ex-US Marine Akshay Nanavati's Solo Antarctica Quest

He is a little black dot on a vast white canvas. On the satellite map tracker, the red line showing the journey he has already covered moves ever so slowly. Akshay Nanavati is attempting to ski-cross the white continent of Antarctica from coast-to-coast. All alone. Pulling a sled of over 180 kilos. At minus 36 degrees. In about 110 days. 

But why? “I have the luxury of choosing my own suffering,” Nanavati says in his recent audio tape. He sends an audio clip whenever he can, once in two or three days, to his family and his team. In the audio note he says he recalls reading a book on Bataan’s Death March of 1942 when Imperial Japanese Army forced around 75,000 American and Filipino Prisoners of War (PoWs) to take the treacherous journey from Bataan. Nanavati says what he is enduring is miniscule compared to what those PoWs did. 

The 40-year-old is determined to become the first person to complete an unsupported, coast-to-coast ski crossing of Antarctica—the coldest, windiest and most isolated continent on Earth—covering 2,700 km. The expedition—dubbed “The Great Soul Crossing”—if it succeeds, will break several Guinness World Records. But Nanavati doesn’t look at it that way. He is more focused on the learnings he would share with the world. 

While speaking from the Filchner Ice Shelf, Antarctica, he mounds on how he is capsuling time. These 110 days of thirst will turn into a day and then an hour of remembrance. Pain and grunt to conquer would invite a face of rock, yet “he cries while watching movies, especially war movies,” says his wife  Melissa Nanavati.  

The knots of past often tie his knuckles. Nanavati had joined US Marine with his friend ‘Neil’ when he was 18. In fact, the trajectory of his life was pivoted by the movie Black Hawk Down by Riddle Scott Films. The troy of walking in Iraq, in the mirage of victory, took a heavy toll on him. His deployment rang eerie sounds as he went in front of vehicle convoys to detect potential bombs. He was gulped by post traumatic disorder as his friend succumbed to his injuries there.  

 According to Melissa, the trek across Antarctica marks the culmination of Nanavati’s long journey from being a child afraid of the dark to the person he is today. He has spent the past four years preparing for this challenge. His polar mentor, Lars Ebbesen, emphasised that “while this is a massive physical challenge that no one has fully conquered and might appear to be the most obvious obstacle, the mental aspect is, by far, the greatest challenge. It requires an incredible balancing act”.  

Nanavati’s preparation included traveling to Greenland, Norway, and Iceland, staying in a cabin by a frozen lake in Alaska, and skiing with sandbags attached. Nanavati also worked with a certified strength and conditioning specialist, , who incorporated many exercises that could likely be described as “unusual”. 

“My child pulls out his gut to make things happen. How often do you get the Dalai Lama to write forward of your book?” Anjali Nanavati, his mother, asks. “He means to go to the edge of things. When he stated, he was pulling a sled of 180 kilogram,” she adds.  

‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate’—he repeats Carl Jung’s lines like a hymn of prayer bolstering the ultimate motive of life. Meeting yourself in the fabrics of life should be the Karmik realm. Nanavati was like any other teenager running in the allies of Austin. He got involved in drugs. 

His rehab of punching the bean bag till the coating of the blood thickened on his knuckles, “strengthened him somewhere”, his mother says. Many years later, while on a travel to Germany, his eyes parked the lashes on. He went on a dark room retreat for seven days to get halogenic light showers which he thought trespass the void of emptiness. Finding the layers to himself commissioned him to take further endeavors in his expedition. 

Studies show that prolonged darkness triggers the brain to produce molecules like DMT, leading to altered perceptions and accelerated self-revelation and oneness. Hence, he went on to curtain once more in Mexico for ten days. “There has to be something which shatters the paradigm of reality before yourself to achieve the mysticism of universe,” he says. 

Frostbitten, his previous expedition costed him his two fingers. “Heath Ledger, he loves that actor. There can never be a used to, to it. While Shakespeare says: ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players’ Akshay would choose method acting,” his mother says.  

Everything existing is a fable, hence he suggests “beware of unearned wisdom” to negotiate with yourself while suffering. He wrote a book in 2017, Fearvana. The contemplated notion of these negative emotions, as he pens in his books, are linked with the joys. The gravity of negative emotions churns out the gold everyone keeps searching for. When properly channeled, they can become powerful sources of strength—combining inspiring stories, research in neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality. 

“My kids have been fortunate enough to have traveled across cities and countries to become a sponge to cultures. Had it been in the periphery of a country, things would have been different,” Ajay Nanavati, his father, says.  

Man’s search for meaning, was it? While carrying the heavy sled, he somehow got time to be reminded of the chronicles of Viktor Frankl and limped on psychotherapeutic methods he described. “It is all in mind. A battle within to be won”. His mission since day one was to amputate the nerve of fear. Searching for the slack of understanding who he is. Did he find out when he ran 167 miles in Liberia to raise funds for a child’s treatment? Or while meditating, to find that core of his being?   

What is there beyond life? When the door of life collapses on your head, and the whisper of heartbeat recedes, does it pain? Will we all be just bones to cry on? Why do we wake up in the morning then? No worldly rule could puncture the belief in which you live and the death in which you will reside.   

 “Inscribe Carl Jung’s quote on my tomb for the leaves which fall so that they can hear the clamor in me,” Nanavati told his parents. Anjali sat on the site to search and hummed. 

 ‘Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world.’ Carl Jung was written in the right-most corner.  

The Great Soul Crossing is all about maximizing the purpose of life. Halfway through, it’s an uphill battle till the South Pole. Once he crosses it, the coastline of completion, the Bay of Whales, stands ready to surrender to his feet.

“What if he dies there?” she had asked her husband who was sitting next to him. “There is nothing more beautiful than dying while doing what you love,” Ajay Nanavati replied.