Life Lessons from an Epic Road Trip
[Applause]
[Applause]
the best image in the world
is no good in the camera
if you have a dream it’s in your mind
it’s a sincere and good dream
don’t ever let it remain in the camera
bring it out show it to the world
because the best picture in the world is
no good in a camera
oh right so um as a young child
i grew up in a place lock called
and there was a small building by the
side of grand front road
or commonly called the gt road and gt
road i don’t know if you are aware
it is a 2 500 kilometer
distance which starts these days from
bashar
and mostly by 2000 years back
this road used to start at kabul and
bring people to chittagong chittagong is
now in bangladesh
so the grand trunk road has seen a lot
of mysteries
happening coming and going i used to
live in a small village next to grand
trunk road
and when we were young children we used
to play around this road
and in those days in early seventies
once in 15 minutes a vehicle will cross
as of now about 20 metres lost in a
minute
you know that same village so um
so we would actually in summers we’ll
come and play on next to this road and
watch people coming and going
and one of the very enticing thing in
the summers which used to happen was
this hippie
anybody’s heard of hippies okay this
hippie
vans would come all the way from i used
to think beginning of the world
and they were going somewhere to the end
of the world
you know we used to think that these
people and i was very enamored
by these people because they used to
wear some psychedelic colored clothes
they used to have a guitar they used to
live life like a gypsy
and they they had a home which was on
the moon
which is amazing like for a person who’s
living in a village whose boundary was
just to the fields and back
and to the gt road and back and watching
these people
i was very enamored by their life and i
was always thinking
whether in my life like them
i’ll go to firework places i was not
sure it was a dream
and that’s a dream i want to talk about
but this is hippie trade
there used to be a cruise called india
man it used to
start in london and amsterdam and come
all the way to kolkata um
through pakistan of course
from kolkata this bus used to be loaded
in a ship
and sent back to london this was a very
very inspiring stuff which i read
in my schools and i used to see these
bus
i think they stopped functioning
sometime in late 70s and as you see them
and the hippie vans volkswagen
vans which used to come with families
and go all the way down to kolkata
then to southeast asia and probably make
their way all the way to
australia now these long trips which i
used to hear about
that was a dream i really wanted to live
my life
so one day uh very anxious of my dream
i went to a post on an astrologer
and i sat with him and i asked him he
also has my life so
on a tiny hand he saw the lines and
uh he told me you’re gonna have a very
good life partner
which i was very happy about and one
thing he told me after
is that you don’t have a foreign travel
life i don’t know if there’s a lion
guard for a travel line in public street
but this already told me it really broke
my heart um
so i was always growing up in my life
in a circle red circle like this which
is like a frog in the well
thinking that in my life i will never go
outside of this way
in my village the village i used to stay
eighty percent of the people have been
maximum to karnal i mean that was a city
next to
our village and the other flamboyant
twenty percent had reached
till delhi or maybe haridwar at times
and there was just one guy who probably
had gone to bombay i used to hear to
become an actor
but that guy came back within a month
and when his money finished he just got
back so that was all the kind of travel
my village people used to do
and and i was here i was with a dream to
actually travel the world
as the time passed at about 17 years of
age i went to national defense academy
um i joined the army after that and
served the country for about 20 years
um in the army uh when you do go to a
lot of places
beyond karnal you go to a lot of jungles
a lot of mountains a lot of deserts
sometimes you’re in the city
so i was always thinking in my life
whether that promise was
right that i would never go abroad on a
foreign travel
so i used to keep cursing him all the
time
at 35 i got an opportunity to go
abroad it was army nominated
uh hosting to united nations
and i was sent to a place called combo
how many have heard of congo
raise your hands wow that’s quite a lot
of people okay
um so david democratic republic of congo
um the peace in that country is kept by
united nations
it will support one country it is very
rich in minerals
and therefore a lot of people are
interested in holding control of that
country
so on this united nations posting
when i went out well i didn’t feel like
a foreign trap
because this is not london or paris or
rome this is congo
and i thought is that what that promise
was thinking
his travel is going to be you know
or stuff like that so um
[Music]
but then one thing was clear from this
posting that this promise was definitely
not right because my
passport was stand i had moved out of
the
well and therefore now i was little free
and i had hoped that my dream of moving
around
to around the world is gonna come true
so that’s my picture in congo and this
this gentleman standing next to me
is a pakistani officer that was a good
thing
so once i got back from congo
this stream continued to dag me and you
keep telling me that
you know you have a dream in your heart
and you’re still not doing anything
about it so as i finished 20 years in
the arm
i powered out and i took a premature
retirement
and came out and here i was now
out of the way but the dream of mine was
still
in the camera so i thought to myself
i have one life just one life no time
ever comes back
half of my life like i interval of a
movie
is over and my picture is still in the
camera
now i said second half of my life
i am going to handcraft myself and not
allow
my picture to remain in the camera
so uh me and my wife
we dropped anything and we came to
design this stream of art which was
called
team 25 so we were then
mid-40s my wife was always younger
so um in mid-40s we thought we have 25
years
of active life left with us
and if we travel to one country
and explore that country well in a year
well that would make 25 countries in 25
years for us and
that’s the dream which we thought was
worth worth living
so was their struggle well there was
immense struggle
financial physical mental
there was a lot of struggle but the
blockbuster amongst them
was this road trip to london it was
opportunity that came our way
sometime in the in the march april of
2018
and i had to leave a group of 12 people
from india to london and we have to
travel that kilometer by kilometer
um there can’t be a better way of
traveling
the world like so to summarize it was a
54 days road trip
two continents 16 time zones 17
countries 31 regions
56 cities half the equator length
20 000 kilometers of drive about 460
driving hours
and about 180 kilometers of walking most
of this walking was to search for pizza
or whatever because we got so fed up in
china’s eating noodles
uh that we really wanted to go and have
some something with you
right so there’s one story i want to
there’s a lot i mean a lot happened on
this trip
it is a 53 day trip so every day
something is happening
we were on 28th day and we were to
i was a landmark day because we had
finished china and we were to enter
central asia so we have to start from a
place called kashgar
uh which is in sinclair province and we
have to travel all the way to ash
osh fertilizer valley uh from where baba
came
if it relates to you and it was a whole
day’s journey
so we started very meticulously
and we reached the chinese border post
at the chinese what waterpost we were
the first ones
but what happened was the systems on
that particular day
went down we were to
take about two hours on the chinese post
and took us eight hours to cross
uh the chinese border we thought we’d be
out in the morning
i was in the evening that we were able
to go ahead
and cross the chinese border now it was
dark by the time
we crossed into kyrgyzstan and
in kyrgyzstan by the time we reached
about eight nine o’clock in the night
the officers were shot now for our
expedition leader
this is a very frightening situation
we were standing in front of a dark
building
no immigration we had bikes whose fuel
was dipping
we had temperature which was falling to
sub-zero and here i was
people hungry nothing to it for last six
to seven hours
and nothing is happening on immigration
so this was very frightening situation
for me and one of the worst nightmares
of mine came through in which i didn’t
know what to do
so we parked all advice i told people
okay guys just relax there’s nothing to
panic i went
inside the building and i saw one small
lamp in one of the rooms on
and i walked up there and i met this one
immigration officer
who was packing his bag he was slipping
his
coat and he was about to leave so in
whatever english he could understand
whatever sign language i could explain
to him
um i told him i said we have had a very
bad day on the road and if you can just
help us out
this man i don’t know what he saw in my
face
he said uh oh okay he put his back down
he
grabbed the keys he opened the office he
fired up the computer systems
and he started doing our paperwork all
by himself we were twelve of us
and while we were doing paperwork he
sent us some tea
i mean that was amazing we had kids we
had children
we had families with us so he finished
by then we finished the
passports it was 12 o’clock in the night
now i was really nervous that we have
11 more hours to go to osh where we were
supposed to stay
and so they checked him and asked me um
so where are you gonna go i said we
gotta go to ash
he said no sir no way you can recharge
today
there’s sub-zero temperatures the water
is frozen on the roads
and you’ll have horses you know
incredibly some horses are free
because they grow horses actually
so they will cross the road and some
animals may hit you
so he says wait let me do something to
you so he called a family
in a village and he arranged
foundation for us and he said
sir we go go go two hours down the road
and you will cross a path called it
krishna is very famous on a silk road
and there is a village and that lady
will come and
fetch it so we drove it was minus eight
degrees celsius the bikers
really had a very very difficult time
they had to get down
warm up their hands on the exhaust and
then drive again so it was
it was a tough day had a tough night and
by the time we reached this village
it was two o’clock in the night and what
do we find
there is this family of four or five
there is the only light on in the old
village
they were standing outside their house
and when we reached there they took us
in
they had put warm food for us they had
laid down
mattresses on ground in three of their
bedrooms
and we just went and was like as if it’s
our own home
well by the time people finished eating
and went off to bed it was three o’clock
i had to do one last thing i stepped out
and wanted to check whether all the
cars and bikes are locked when i saw
those bikes and cars and i came back in
i heard a bit of a sound
of talking in their kitchen so i knocked
and they opened what do i see
six members of this family is in that 10
feet by 7 feet kitchen
they were all tucked in there and they
had left all three of their bedrooms
for us
this is this was a muslim family and it
was a ramazan month
in ramzan at four o’clock
you actually wake up again to eat your
early morning food
now that was the level which really
moved me
many stories happened on on this london
trip like this
on one of the occasions
but that’s the panel and that’s the pass
that being in the in the in the rear is
called mount linen
so these are um they were all communist
block
and um so all the peaks are not there a
there’s a communist
footprint everywhere in central asia so
that’s a fun one
so another in another story
so in um the petrol pumps are foreign
in between and if you miss one petrol
pump probably you
may be out of fuel and that’s what
happened to us we started in the morning
and we were to fuel at about 400
kilometers for this vehicle
and that fuel pump didn’t have fuel
so we started moving to whatever
distance we could and moved forward and
finally
this vehicle which was a logistic
vehicle ran out of view
within about 15-20 minutes there was
this bait this is
but there was big driver trucker who was
coming down
and he saw us standing there
he caught on from his truck he was with
his family his wife was with him
in the truck he got down from his truck
and asked us
i wish that we had a pure he said i know
it was in this place so you should
always carry reserve fuel
he gave us 21 liters of diesel some
local bread and food
and we wanted to pay him he refused to
take the money
this is god’s work and this is a ramazan
month i cannot take
anything from you
in china we got stuck in a windstorm you
see these bikes why they’re leaning to
the right
they are actually facing a 80 kilometers
per hour
sandstorm and they say
uh my son who was with me he’s 14 and
15 now he
he asked me that i want to try it right
because this was definitely a very very
dangerous situation
we actually after this picture we put
the bikes down
on the road and we went down under a
bridge culvert to hide ourselves
and one phone call to the authorities
they blocked the highway because it’s
only one way you can travel
it’s a six lane highway on one side you
can only go forward
so they had to block the whole highway
and they brought us slowly back
to our hotel now
on the road trip to london there were at
least a dozen more situations in which
uh we found this was insane we thought
we will get stuck
we thought we’ll really have a bad guy
we thought we’ll have accidents
but none of that happened moment we face
the situation
sooner or later some of the other head
came our way
now just imagine why would
some immigration officer in them on his
way home
stop by and do your immigration out of
the line
and then he’ll arrange a statement why
would
a family who’s going through a ramzan
one wake up in the middle of the night
cook food for you vacate all all three
of their bedrooms
for you why would anu’s big
trucker get down and give you free
diesel
why and how would you get saved from a
life threatening situation like
like a storm like this but let me tell
you why
if you have a very strong will
and if you are on a noble mission there
is always
humanity and help and support available
i can tell you this 53-day road trip
which we did
there must be about 20 to 30 situations
in which we thought
we’ll get stuck but we did not get stuck
on 21st of june 2018 we were supposed to
finish
in london at five o’clock we finished at
four
he was ahead of time with all these
problems
solved
so what’s the wisdom wisdom is very
simple
if you have courage
to take the first few steps about your
dream
and you have tenacity to never
never never ever give up
lots of doors open for you lots of
support comes your way
lots of help comes there is humanity and
help
everywhere look at our dream
from that promise who said i would never
go abroad
we had a 1925 as i stand today
um in last seven years of our company’s
existence
i’ve done 34 countries so dream 25
is already a little distance behind
now i have dream 50. why not i mean i’ll
start in india
go all the way down to australia then
fly down to alaska
anchorage come all the way down to
buenos aires
then go to cape town then go all the way
to london from london i’ll go all the
way to vladivostok that covers seven
continents
in a year’s travel well that’s my next
dream because green 25
was so encouraging and so life
fulfilling for me
yeah seven contents one likes why not
so this brings me to
the thing i started with best image in
the world
is no good in a camera you have to bring
it out
and make it into a reality and let me
tell you this
this wonderful world you see today
this columbus discovery in america
somebody going on to move
was sometimes somebody’s dream
they brought it out and they had courage
to
not give up and that’s when
amazing stories of success are made
so here i will finish the talk i have to
give
and i wish and pray that your sincere
dreams all come true
thank you