21-year-old on a ride of a lifetime

Riding on a Royal Enfield motorcycle across all 29 states and six union territories of the country in 150 days is most certainly to take the road less travelled. And 21-yearold Rohith Subramaniam, a Chennai youth, speaks with a wisdom that seems to have come from his travels. He has been on the road for about two months now, having covered thousands of miles and has just sent me a picture of a chai shop lit by a flickering sodium lamp on a highway in Madhya Pradesh. This is where he’ll be sleeping for the night before he heads out to Indore.

“It’s experiences like these that make my journey so memorable. Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world,” he says over the phone. It’s the world that he will take on once he is through with the Indian leg of his travel agenda. Rohith, who set out on this road journey on January 15, aims to cover 46 countries across South East Asia and Europe by July 2017, a distance of over 1 lakh km. 

He was leading a fairly humdrum life in 2015 when he came across an article by a 40-year-old American who regretted that he could not do even half the items on his bucket list that he had put together in his 20s. This included travelling around the world. “I didn’t want to end up like that man,” Rohith says. “It was then that I realised that the right time never comes: you have to create it. I decided I would travel the world, something I had always dreamed of.” 

Rohith’s was a fairly typical upbringing in a TamBrahm family in Adambakam, Chennai – but with a difference. “My parents used to get me goodies when I got zero in exams,” he laughs. “They just wanted me to be happy. They were the ones who urged me to also go to Europe and South Asia,” he says gratefully. 

He next had to look at practicalities, like funds for his trip. He and a friend has set up a platform, called FundMyDream, in 2014, and managed to garner finances for a film that his friend wanted to make. Rohith had just quit an internship while doing an integrated MBA in Bengaluru. “I had had enough of internships,” he recalls exasperatedly, the travel bug clearly having gripped him. “I now used the same avenue to gather funds for my trip. We’ve managed to collect over Rs 6 lakh until now,” he says. 

But this is money that he is saving up for his international sojourn that he will embark on once he finishes the Indian leg of the ride. Funding this segment -- or ‘shamelessly asking people for help’, as he puts it — was not easy. “Initially, people thought we’d lost our minds,” recalls Rohith. “But as we persisted, they came on board.” Now, Wrangler is sponsoring his clothes, WickedRide, a luxury bike rental company, is his on-ground partner and Zeus is sponsoring his riding gear. In return, he spreads the word about them wherever he goes. 

He is even paid to sport a beard, courtesy Ustaara, a men’s grooming products company! There is also a GoPro camera that takes pride of place on his helmet and captures every single mile of his journey. 

What makes Rohith’s journey special is that he has no scheduled stopovers at hotels. He mostly finds a place to sleep through Facebook. Complete strangers have welcomed him into their homes. “People have showered me with unconditional love,” he says appreciatively. “I now know that I will have a family in every state of our country. People have shared their most personal stories with me, slept on the floor so that I would be comfortable, and made me feel like I was one of their own. I’ve become a better human being for this. I rediscover myself with every mile I travel.” 

And when unable to find a host, he has not shied away from making a bus stop or petrol pump or even a police station his night halt. 

En route, Rohith has also managed to take up jobs that he would not have dreamt of taking up in the course of a normal day in Chennai. “I was an ice-cream vendor for a day, worked as a bar attendant in Goa and even helped lay a road in Kochi,” he says.  

His four-month-long European tour will start from Finland and will cover 32 countries. Later, on his South Asian tour, he will travel across Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nepal and Bhutan in 90 days. You can follow his journey on Tripoto, Facebook, and Instagram.