When Binu Varghese and Nijas Thamarassery, two lawyers practising in the Kerala High Court, set out on a road trip across India, beyond the obvious quenching of their wanderlust, what also motivated them was a yearning to understand the country.
A true, immersive experience that would peel away layers of India — its geography and culture, and boundless diversity, enlivened by its people.
Binu and 28-year-old Nijas are longtime friends who first met while studying law. Binu, who’s twice the age of Nijas (58), was originally an engineer and only took up law recently. He has travelled to several places abroad.
“But I felt, without travelling through my own country and witnessing its beauty,” Binu points out, “all my other trips were meaningless.” “That’s where this idea of a road trip stemmed from,” he adds.
The first leg of their nearly 80-day trip began in 2023. The duo travelled from Kerala to Ladakh in a jeep. “A road trip is ideal to see how the geography, language and culture change with every mile,” Nijas highlights.
For the entirety of their trip, the duo slept inside the jeep or in tents. “Occasionally, people used to invite us to their homes, offer us a place to sleep. This further augmented our India experience,” he adds.
In 24 days, they covered around 9,145 kilometres.
"That was phase one of our journey. We decided to split our trip into two to account for the weather. The best time to visit Kashmir and Ladakh is around September and October. And for Northeast, it is the beginning of the year,” Nijas adds.
This second phase of the journey commenced in March. But before it commenced, the duo realised that they didn’t just want to visit the places, the journey also needed to be meaningful. “In January, we were hearing about the drug menace in Kerala. So, we decided to make this trip an anti-drug campaign,” he explains.
During their road trip from Kerala to the Northeast and Sikkim, Nijas and Binu also took classes in schools, colleges and in public spaces. “We took around 100-120 classes on drug abuse. To all kinds of people — from farmers to children,” Binu says.
Across the journey, one thing that became evident was this: drugs in not only a Kerala problem. “The vice grip of narcotic substances looms large across much of the country. Honestly, it’s scary. We hope that our efforts would inspire at least a handful of people to stay clear of drugs,” Nijas says.
While exciting, the journey was also not without its challenges. Two incidents that remain etched in their memory are when a sudden downpour in Arunachal Pradesh flooded their tents, and another time, when in a remote area in Ladakh, the two, by then very hungry, were comforted by strangers. “But we couldn’t wait for them to finish cooking the race. We were so very hungry that we asked for some half-baked rice to appease ourselves,” Nijas highlights.
But for all their travails, the journey, whilst itself rewarding, was bountiful in other ways. “For all its diversity, the country has one common denominator: people everywhere are helpful. Local people, strangers we came across on the road, treated us with affection and empathy. They invited us to their homes, cooked us food and gave us a place to sleep. India, at the end of the day, we understood, is just that: its people,” the duo points out.
The two hope that their journey (which has entered the Worldwide Book of Records for the longest car journey through most Indian states and union territories and international borders as a team, and the world’s longest car journey for anti-drug awareness as a team), has also inspired many to develop a healthy addiction: wanderlust.