From monkhood to Michael Jackson: How Ashwin Srisailam built Ahhaa, the mind-fitness app

At the age of 13, Ashwin Srisailam had already chosen a spiritual path that would carry him from a monastery in Andhra Pradesh to the private lives of pop icon Michael Jackson and Rick Allen, the legendary one-armed drummer of Def Leppard. Now 46, he has transformed that unlikely journey into a full-fledged career in mind fitness and co-founded a wellness app, Ahhaa, with Diane Bacchus. It is not just the app but also their shared love for running marathons and public speaking that drew Ashwin and Diane together.

“We met in 2012 in New York through the organisers of an event where both of us were giving a talk. I was fascinated when I heard Ashwin talking. We soon became friends and started finding ways to propagate mind fitness through technology and that’s how Ahhaa was born in 2017,” shares Diane, who is also a spoken-word artiste.

Before Ashwin explains the working mechanism of Ahhaa in the realm of mental and emotional health, he asserts that the movement distils the observations and teachings of the spiritual practices he has been associated with since his teens. “One of our biggest philosophies is awareness,” he says. “We can’t necessarily expect people to find time to meditate, go to a seminar, or listen to a podcast and then feel better. So, Ahhaa is a way where the awareness of daily life moments is recorded. We call it mind fitness and not mental wellbeing because we want people to understand what it is like to have a fit mind, through the concept of a fit body. A fit body has measurements like BMI and you can record calories lost while walking or running. Ahhaa keeps that record to study patterns that form habits,” explains Ashwin.

He backs the concept with relatable examples, citing the dopamine hit one gets from small achievements and equates it to observing one’s mind through daily chores. “You’re basically doing what you would do through the day but Ahhaa, as a tool, makes you mindful of those activities and then creates a dashboard around your mind’s and day’s patterns. It’s making you intentional. It’s a lot like recording your workout on Strava,” says Diane. “The extra effort to feed that data in the app doesn’t feel like an effort, the moment you feel rewarded. So there’s a dashboard that rewards you, makes you feel like you’re just becoming fitter by the day. Once the reward mechanism kicks in, people get addicted,” Ashwin adds.

Ashwin has found Rick Allen as the app’s brand ambassador. His spiritual journey with Rick began some 20 years ago at the same monastery in Andhra Pradesh where Ashwin assigned himself to monkhood. Now a former monk, he looks back at his time in the ‘gurukul’ (as he calls it) as a gateway to new opportunities. “I met Rick at the time when he was still healing from the trauma of losing his arm in a car accident and yet practising his drums to secure a spot among the world’s top 10 drummers. He was referred to the monastery by Hollywood actress Catherine Oxenberg. He’s the epitome of mind fitness, for his ability to bounce back from that accident,” says Ashwin.

At the monastery, he also got in touch with Michael Jackson, with whom he stayed connected for nearly three years before his death. “Someone from LA had come to one of our events and that person had accidentally shared her experience at the monastery with Michael Jackson’s nanny. She reached out to us and at some point of time she told Michael about how she felt and that’s how he got curious. One day, she called him and told me it was Michael just five minutes before asking me to speak with him,” recalls Ashwin.

About one of the important concerns that Michael shared with him, Ashwin recollects: “He wanted to visualise a crowd of 60,000-70,000 people at his concert experiencing a shift in their lives and wanted them to feel peaceful, happier, and connected with each other after his concert.”

That same pursuit of awareness which guided Ashwin as a young monk now reflects the philosophy behind Ahhaa. In his eyes, mind fitness is not just an idea; it is a daily discipline. And Ahhaa is his way of bringing that discipline to the world.