Meet Ankit & Rashmi

When Amar Salvi invited them to contribute a hobbyist spotlight for this month's issue, Ankit and Rashmi's first reaction was disbelief. They are, by their own description, two modest weekend aquarists running a couple of simple, low-tech nano setups — nothing that screams “feature story.” The reaction quickly gave way to a different concern: how would they even find the time to write the piece?

By The Weekend Aquarist

Estimated read time: 3–4 minutes

As amateur hobbyists, they've always envied the professionals — researchers, scientists, entrepreneurs, retailers — for their sheer proximity to the underwater world. But for them, and for many readers of this publication, life gets in the way. New parenthood layered on top of professional and family obligations comes with real physical, emotional, and financial cost. They're not alone in that experience either — theirs is the generation researchers have started calling the burnout generation, paradoxically hyper-connected by technology while quietly starved of real social connection. It's a problem serious enough that the World Health Organisation instituted a Commission on Social Connection, and the US Surgeon General went as far as declaring loneliness an epidemic.Within all of that chaos, this spotlight became a chance to reflect on and share the one part of their lives that gives them uncomplicated pleasure.

A Hobby as an Identity

If you're asked to describe yourself, how would you answer? Professional identities — lawyer, engineer, doctor, entrepreneur — are fine as far as they go. But Ankit and Rashmi raise a genuinely interesting question: do they actually represent who a person is? For them, being hobbyists is just as essential a part of identity as being a career academic, a husband and wife, or a son and a daughter. They reach for an unexpected pop-culture reference to make the point — the acclaimed web series Severance, where the protagonist is shown owning two separate Betta splendens, one blue and one red, each symbolising a fractured half of his existence.

From Goldfish Bowls to a Real Community

Their entry into the hobby followed a familiar path — the one where businessmen and shopkeepers sell customers the comforting lie that a goldfish belongs in a bowl. It took years, and exposure to international fishkeeping YouTubers, before they understood how deep the hobby of fishkeeping and planted aquariums actually goes. Sourcing plants, aquascaping materials, and compatible fish remained a genuine challenge in India for a long time. That's changed — Indian YouTubers and a wave of local businesses have grown up specifically to support the country's expanding hobbyist community, to the point where local fish stores run by hobbyists themselves, and dedicated online stores, are no longer hard to find.

Why Nano? Why Planted?

Their early builds were, in their own words, as artificial as plastic. The shift toward planted tanks came down to two things: what it actually does for the fish, recreating something closer to a natural environment, and its aesthetic appeal, which frankly has no real substitute. The move to nano tanks specifically was shaped by something far more mundane — apartment living. It's a genuinely revealing data point: the average Indian flat, as of 2024, comes in at roughly 1,540 square feet, compared with 1,818 square feet in the US as of 2020. Space, in other words, is a real design constraint for most Indian hobbyists, not an aesthetic choice.

Designing for Sustainability, Not for Contests

Several of their decisions were driven by one need above all else: keeping maintenance low. They deliberately opted out of the CO2-injected, contest-display-tank arms race — not for lack of ambition, but because a CO2 system, especially a DIY one, comes with multiple points of failure that need regular supervision. For new parents juggling competing obligations, that's a near impossibility. That constraint shaped everything downstream of it, right down to which plants made the cut. And even with careful, tested choices, they're candid about the reality nobody warns beginners about: perfection doesn't happen on the first attempt. Plants melt. Some thrive and some simply refuse to root, no matter how well the water parameters check out.

Their honest takeaway, hard-won over repeated trial and error, is one every beginner eventually has to learn for themselves: experimenting with different plant species until you find the ones that actually work for your specific tank is simply part of the process — not a sign you're doing something wrong.

Read the full story

The complete feature — including their full plant list, the specific businesses and creators who shaped their journey, and the rest of their reflections on identity, time, and the hobby — appears in the February 2026 issue of The Weekend Aquarist.

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