Thus, I Travel.
For me, to travel is to live. It makes me modest. You realize how tiny a place you occupy in this world once you get out of the box.
How did it start?
It all started in the summer of 2016, when I got a call saying one of my college friends had passed away. We both were part of the same music band. He was in his mid-twenties and death might be the last thing he would have expected. But he died of a brain haemorrhage. It made me think about the vulnerability of life. We all have passions and plans that we keep postponing until the day we die. So I decided to act. I packed my bags and started traveling across India. I literally was living out of my suitcase, making travel films.
What was the journey like?
There is this quote from the book ‘Into the Wild’, which says —
The core of man’s spirit comes from new experiences.
In my journey, I lived with strangers understanding their perspective of life. I stayed in a Gurdwara, spent 3 days in a Dargah in Ajmer, meditated in Bodh Gaya and took bath in the holi lake of Pushkar. In all these places, I didn’t see different religions. I just saw people and their hope. Their faith in something which is bigger than life.
The streets of old Jodhpur were filled with laughter, as people from different religions and even continents played Holi together. The idea of strangers who didn’t even share a common language, dancing together in front of a bonfire, playing with colored powder made me realize that the goal of the human race is happiness and you become happy when you start accepting people for who they are. Getting out of my comfort zone to experience this was the most defining point in 25 years of my life.
Staying in the household of a Kathak dancer for a week in Rajasthan, made me understand money can’t buy you happiness. Despite being a solo traveller, I never felt alone. I stayed both with people who saw nothing but desert sand their entire lives and with people who didn’t know life existed outside of the snow capped mountains.
The farther I went from civilization, the more welcoming people became. The less they had, the more ready they were to share.
What did I learn?
Staying in all these spiritual places made me understand that borders can’t divide humanity. The crux of life is to accept other people regardless of their cultures, languages, ethnicities or religions. But on the road to evolution, we, human beings have lost this trait somewhere. And I travel to find it again.
Here is the audio-visual version of this article:
Call to Action
Thank you for reading this article. If you’ve read this far, please consider recommending it. If you are a traveler, a filmmaker or a travel filmmaker, hope this article has inspired you to further your passion. Do check out and subscribe to my youtube channels below.
Adwhyta: My Film Production Channel — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU7XVC0jMY1tGEUf6m3lC0w
Raga Riot: My Music Channel — https://www.youtube.com/RagaRiot
