The world is their oyster

Tushar and Sanjay love to be on road and survive on street food. You are invited to join them in The Great Indian World Trip

Manpriya Singh

Six continents, fifty countries, 90,000 km traversed without a GPD, sounds like a mother of all adventures. Any other description wouldn’t quite cut it. “It is the mother of all road trips,” co-host Tushar puts it blunt and bold and gives a lowdown on what to expect from their show The Great Indian World Trip.

Chips in Sanjay, “It is something you can do only once in your lifetime. Because, for a trip like this, one has to put everything else in life at stake and on hold. A lot many other things need to fall in place, right from finances to your health, to be able to take a trip like this.”

Aired on TLC, the series follows along two simple Indians who love to travel, enjoy food, experience new cultures and explore the not so typical places in the world. Everything else matches an explorer’s paradise save for the fact that the hosts can proudly quote seven world records and one Guinness World Record.

Shares Tushar, “Some of the places that we have been to are not even shown on the map. From the extreme corners of the continent, southern most tip of Africa to northern tip of Alaska.” A Fellow at the Royal Geographic Society, he caught the bug early on, “I used to live in London before and that’s when I could see myself doing that all my life.” The decision to quit the IT sector was more out of passion and less out of impulse.

Ten years is a pretty long time and Tushar has spent each of it by travelling to more than 30 countries. “Right now New Zealand is very high on my to-do list,” shares the author of Road Affair, in which he has narrated his various driving expeditions and records. Ditto for Sanjay, who for the first 15 years of life used to travel with his family. “We both can actually love to be on road and survive on street food.” An active participant of some of the most challenging rallies in India, he has led several expeditions to Ladakh and Rajasthan. “I am also the first person to drive a Tata Nano to Khardung La Pass—the highest motorable road in the world.”

Russia and China figure in his list of must explore places. “Because they are totally different from the entire world.”

The world that they have pretty much explored in entirety by now. “Some of the places that we went to, we were the first Indians they were meeting. There are a lot of misconceptions about Indians. People think we are extremely particular about our eating habits and also that we work very hard and don’t know how to take time off.” Meanwhile, along the great world trip, they chance upon things and experiences as rare as they come. From the UFO Capital to a BBQ in Kentucky, from driving from the end of the word Ushuaia to the top of the world in Deadhorse, doing the Tango on the streets of Buenos Aries, listening to Blues in “The South”, wearing a kilt and shopping in Scotland, eating Weiner Schnitzel in Vienna…They can go on…Because the boys have just returned, “from the mother of all road trips.”

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The series premiered on December 15