Aarti Upadhyay is a seasoned marketing and communications professional with over 14 years of experience spanning advertising, IT, and government consulting. A postgraduate from St. Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad, she also holds a PG Certification in Advertising & PR (Online) from MICA. Throughout her career, Aarti has skillfully blended strategy with storytelling, helping brands find their authentic voice.
Her debut book, Remnants: A Collection of Grief and Hope, is a heartfelt exploration of love, loss, and resilience — themes that reflect her deep engagement with human emotion and inner worlds. Aarti is an avid reader who lives and thrives on stories, both real and imagined. As someone who has spent her professional life shaping narratives, this collection marks a personal milestone in expressing her own.
Fascinated by human psychology, she often spends her free time studying emotions and observing the quiet, complex ways people connect and cope. She also firmly believes that dogs were created to show humans the purest form of love — selfless, warm, and unwavering. When she’s not lost in thought or deep in observation, she finds solace in the pages of a good book, the world of cinema, or the endless possibilities of stories she weaves on her own — blending imagination with insight to explore the beautiful messiness of life.
Interview with Aarti
Eliteone Stories: What inspired you to write Remnants? Was there a particular moment or experience that prompted this collection?
Aarti Upadhyay: Remnants was born from a deeply personal journey through grief, love, and healing. The collection began as raw, unfiltered emotions poured into my journal during a time when I struggled to voice my pain aloud. A pivotal moment came during my first session with my psychiatrist, Dr. Sarthak Dave, when he encouraged me to stop fighting my emotions and simply feel them—to sit with the ache, the silence, and the unanswered questions. That advice became the foundation of this work.
The poems, like “Crossroads of Silence” and “When Grief Became My Body,” capture the visceral weight of loss—the hollow spaces left behind, the physicality of sorrow. Others, such as “A Cry for Help” and “The Void,” reflect the isolation and desperation I felt, while “Encountering Empathy” and “The Pace of Healing” document the slow, nonlinear process of recovery. Writing became my way of mapping the uncharted terrain of grief, turning fragmented emotions into something tangible.
The encouragement of friends who resonated with my early poems, and the gaps between therapy sessions, which gave me time to process, further shaped the collection. Remnants isn’t just about pain; it’s about the resilience that emerges from it (“Echoes of Hope”), the love that persists (“Maa, My World”), and the quiet strength found in small moments (“When Joy Knocked”). Ultimately, this book is my answer to the question: How do we carry what remains?
Eliteone Stories: Your poems feel deeply personal and emotionally raw. How did you navigate the vulnerability that comes with sharing such intimate reflections?
Aarti Upadhyay: As a writer, I believe you cannot fully honor your truth or your readers without complete honesty. Yes, sharing such raw pieces invites judgment, but I also knew these poems weren’t just mine anymore. They belonged to anyone who’s ever felt grief’s weight, love’s fractures, or the quiet triumph of healing.
Writing Remnants was like stitching wounds into art: painful, necessary, and ultimately transformative. I trusted that vulnerability would carve pathways for connection that someone, somewhere, might see their own heart echoed in these lines and feel less alone. That possibility made the risk worth it.
Eliteone Stories: The title Remnants is evocative — can you tell us more about its significance and how it reflects the themes of the book?
Aarti Upadhyay: The title Remnants comes from the idea that life, at its core, is an act of letting go—but what remains afterward is what shapes us. There’s a line from Life of Pi that has always stayed with me: “All of life is an act of letting go, but what hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.”
This collection is about those fragments we carry forward the joy, the grief, the healing, the quiet transformations. Remnants isn’t just about loss; it’s about what lingers, what survives, and how we learn to hold it all without breaking. The name is a reminder: even in the aftermath, we are never left with nothing. We carry proof that we loved, we endured, and we are still becoming.
Eliteone Stories: Many of your poems explore grief and healing. How has poetry helped you process these emotions in your own life?
Aarti Upadhyay: Poetry became my night ritual of release, a sacred space between therapy sessions where I could pour out what words alone couldn’t hold.
There’s a quiet magic in transferring emotions to paper; once written, they lose their grip on you. I’d spill my rawest thoughts at night, then meet them again in daylight with clearer eyes. The words didn’t vanish the pain, but they transformed it like turning lead into something lighter, something I could finally carry.
Writing taught me that grief processed is not grief erased, but grief understood. And sometimes, that’s the most healing step of all.
Eliteone Stories: You’re a seasoned marketing and communications professional. How did your experience in that world influence your writing and storytelling style?
Aarti Upadhyay: My career in marketing taught me that the most powerful stories aren’t just true—they’re transformative. In branding, we don’t just share facts; we craft narratives that resonate and create meaning. I brought the same approach to Remnants: these poems aren’t just about grief, but about our ability to transform pain into something meaningful.
Marketing trained me to find the emotional core of a message and deliver it with clarity. I applied that discipline to poetry—each piece distils complex emotions into their most essential, relatable form. The truth remains raw, but the storytelling makes it accessible. After years of shaping campaigns, I’ve learned that the most memorable stories are simply truth, well told. Remnants is my attempt to do just that.
Eliteone Stories: Which poets or authors have influenced your work, especially in terms of how you approach emotion and introspection?
Aarti Upadhyay: My writing breathes with the voices of those who mastered emotional alchemy: Ocean Vuong’s tender brutality, Sylvia Plath’s razor-sharp introspection, Joan Didion’s surgical clarity in dissecting grief. Shakespeare taught me how private anguish becomes universal, Mary Oliver showed me how to find the sacred in ordinary sorrows, and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet remains my compass for sitting with uncertainty.
Eliteone Stories: The book touches on universal human emotions. What kind of response or connection do you hope readers will have with your work?
Aarti Upadhyay: Grief is a universal language, yet so often it leaves us feeling stranded in solitude. With Remnants, I hope readers find what I needed most in my own darkest moments—not answers, but companionship. A sense that someone else has stood where they stand, that the weight they carry has been felt before, and most importantly, that healing is not only possible but already unfolding in the simple act of turning these pages.
If just one poem makes a reader feel less alone, or offers a fleeting moment of grace amid their grief, then this book has done its work.
Eliteone Stories: You mention being fascinated by human psychology. How does that interest inform your writing, both creatively and thematically?
Aarti Upadhyay: Human emotions with all their contradictions and complexities are my deepest fascination. Like Shakespeare in his tragedies, I’m drawn to the raw, unfiltered truth of our flaws and vulnerabilities. You can’t separate joy from sorrow any more than you can divide light from dark; they define each other.
Aarti Upadhyay: In Remnants, I’ve tried to honor that wholeness to write not just about grief, but about how it intertwines with love, resilience, and even humor. The poems don’t judge emotions as “good” or “bad”; they simply let them exist, because that’s how healing begins: by feeling all of it.
Eliteone Stories: What was the most challenging part of writing Remnants, and what was the most rewarding?
Aarti Upadhyay: The hardest part was revisiting pain with intention—not just feeling it, but shaping it into art. Some poems demanded I relive moments I wanted to forget, like reopening wounds to clean them properly. “When Grief Became My Body” and “The Void” were particularly difficult; they forced me to sit with emotions I’d spent years avoiding.
But the reward came in the alchemy of that process. When readers share that a poem like “Echoes of Hope” or “When Joy Knocked” mirrored their own experiences, it transforms my private catharsis into something universal. That’s the magic—when personal grief becomes a bridge for others, and what once hurt now heals.
Eliteone Stories: Now that Remnants is out in the world, what’s next for you as a writer? Are you working on a new collection or exploring other forms of storytelling?
Aarti Upadhyay: I’m in a season of quiet study—exploring the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and emotion. Like a researcher of the heart, I’m observing how we metabolize love, grief, and everything in between. This introspection fuels my creativity.
When it’s time to write again, I see two paths: a deeper dive into poetry or a shift into fiction, where emotions can unfold through story. The ideas are brewing; I’m listening for their shape.
For now, I’m simply a student of the human condition, trusting the next project will reveal itself when it’s ready.
