I’m a south Indian by birth but mostly have only seen South Delhi. My mom was a journalist and my dad a telecom engineer, both of whom rose through the ranks in their respective lines of work. My brother is also a techie and is based in the UK. To sum it up – my family has shaped my professional outlook in life, which is defined by hard work and creativity.
My parents moved a lot, so the taste of travel and road trips has been around since childhood. Till the age of 23, I would have been called a quintessential Indian boy who grew up by first nurturing ambitions of becoming an engineer and then joined a premier B-School for an MBA degree.
ScoutMyTrip – Helping people plan road-trips
It all ended in 2009 when I called it quits with a well-paying corporate job to devote full-time attention to IndiBlogger. After selling off all I owned, I moved to Mumbai with a couple of bags in my hand, including a car. With the savings, I bought a bike. I went by the moniker – The guy who sold his car to buy the Royal Enfield Bullet. Incidentally, the baraat was on Royal Enfield bikes! In 2016, I went back to my love of biking and co-founded ScoutMyTrip with my long-time biker buddy Deepak Ananth.
It is an old story and goes back to when I was a little kid, with big glasses which covered more than half my face. Dad had bought his first car – a Maruti 800. Dad was the roadster of the 90s, and I was fortunate enough to have been part of his trailblazing adventures road tripping in India. My mom wrote about it in this blog post titled “Going Aage Se Right, Since Forever.”
He taught me how to drive in 2001 when he threw me behind the wheel of the then Ford Ikon on a road trip from Delhi to the interiors of Rajasthan. My traveling took a big break when I was in engineering and then MBA, only to rediscover the love for open roads when I bought a second-hand Suzuki Shogun in Hyderabad. I graduated to a Royal Enfield after that, and there was no highway I left un-turned. I started biking with zeal, mostly to get away from the city.
My parents were big-time travelers. Every month, we planned trips out of Delhi. Dad even had a road atlas always in the glove compartment of the car. When we were too lazy to make elaborate plans – we would drive out to the most decent-looking highway motel and stay overnight after eating some food. Dad had his customary beer, and he would feed his two ravenously hungry sons – a tandoori chicken or two, while mom made do with some soup and her favorite desserts. All this was happening in the 90s. So even now, when I see families hit the roads – it brings back fond memories of formative years in the lessons of wanderlust.
Traveling was also a reason I found my wife – because she loved the open roads just as much as I did! I’d have to go back to the trip in 2015 with my wife, Swati. We had road tripped from Mumbai to Chandigarh in the peak winters of January. Most often than not, road trips become a commute where the destination is the sole aim. This trip was unlike any of those.
It took us ten days to reach Chandigarh from Mumbai, and we explored every nook and cranny of Gujarat and Rajasthan on the way to get to Chandigarh. We even stayed in the same Haryana Tourism highway lodge; my dad made our stay in once. On that trip, the weather being so cold, we enjoyed the food to the north. Noting sometimes subtle, and sometimes very drastic changes in a change of paranthas as we headed north, to even the taste of the humble chai. Goat milk chai served with a beedee (compliments of the cook) in Rajasthan continues to remain one of the best chai’s I’ve had though I am a coffee person.
In 2017, my all-time traveling partner Deepak and me started our own company, ScoutMyTrip.
ScoutMyTrip is a road trip itinerary planner with a marketplace of travel experts. It has been helping people plan their road trip holidays to explore our beautiful country. With over 35,000 active users and over 5000 trips planned, ScoutMyTrip is led by a core community of travel experts called “Scouts.” ScoutMyTrip aims to create the next wave of employment in India by giving a viable career option to the many travel experts in various parts of the country, access to a large traveler base who seek curated experiences and itineraries.
We picked this idea because both of us love road trips. Having road-tripped on the iconic Royal Enfield bikes in India with over 600,000 miles between us, we decided to build a solution to help people road trips better. Because not everyone will know roads as we would do.
Deepak and I have known each other for a while now. A big thanks to the biking communities we’ve been part of. In all the road trips we’ve been on, we hit it off well as friends first. Maybe because he is elder, he usually lets me have my way most of the time! It isn’t the first time; Deepak and I are working together in ScoutMyTrip. We were the core team members and office bearers of a Mumbai-based Royal Enfield club focused on charity and philanthropic work.
Our families were very supportive when we started ScoutMyTrip. Parents who heard us out, asked the right questions, and then wholeheartedly supported us, spouses who stood by us, ready to fight the same battles along with us, helped to make our minds up much more accessible. But the doubts of whether people will accept such a platform plagued us in the initial phase.
Also, were we properly going about this plagued us in the initial phase. From things that we took for granted, like office space to the infrastructure for running a company, to get simple, mundane tasks done had to be divided and done by both of us. In that sense, it was a learning and hard-fought battle to achieving what we did.
Money is always an issue with most start-ups. Both of us boot-strapped ScoutMyTrip with all our savings, and we had to get the product up and running within budget to ensure that we stayed afloat. Again, family and friends were a huge help in solving most of these issues coming up in our start-up ScoutMyTrip. Being an entrepreneur, it’s essential to have a space you call your own, where you think and mull over work from a distance; come up with fresh ideas, and dive back in when you hit your desk. Before I knew it, with fresh ideas coming straight from the highways – I was only going back for more!
I travel a lot! Sometimes, my wife and I are lost during weekends when we’re stuck in the city and not road tripping outside. We detest malls and stepping into crowded places, and highways were our refuge. Last year may have been the most I have traveled in a single calendar year with over 40 weekends on the road. With each trip averaging around 600-700 km each, it would have been around 25,000 km in one year.
Adding a few longer trips, like the Mumbai – Chandigarh – MP – Mumbai solo trips, comes to over 35,000 km. Not bad! In terms of time, that would be nothing less than 2500 hours on the highway, a tad bit more than 100 days. I know all this sounds a tad bit like a fairy tale, but it’s a lot of hard work, and it takes a toll on your health and schedule. So, I take extra precautions when traveling about food, especially making it a point to catch some exercise. Days also start and end early.
There is a long way to go, but we’ve had our fair share of recognition coming our way, which makes us believe that we are doing something right. In Feb 2019, ScoutMyTrip was the winner of the Maharashtra Startup Week by the Govt. of Maharashtra. In Mar 2019, ScoutMyTrip was recognized by Startup India / DIPP. ScoutMyTrip has been chosen as top 20 travel tech start-ups by FICCI in 2017, Top 10 start-ups in India (Silicon India). But I believe all of this is still nothing. There are many more miles to go before I sleep.
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