THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: “I Don’t want to be a messenger, I want to be the message,” says Subramanian Narayanan, as he treads the mean, busy NH road, hardly 4 km away from the airport. With the dogged determination of creating awareness about road safety, the 41-year-old is traversing the coastal route from Kanyakumari. His target is to walk 60-70 km on a day and reach Kashmir. He starts early morning, takes a break in the afternoon, only to hit the trail in the late afternoon.
Subramanian started walking since the morning of Saturday from Kanyakumari and reached Poovar by 7 pm. On Sunday morning, he was accorded a warm welcome at NH bypass where he interacted with the public, some of them expressing solidarity with his cause and joining him in the walk. School students, police personnel, CRPF jawans and members of various organisations joined the walk. After the function, he went back to Poovar to resume his solo walkathon. “I will not cheat. So, I went back to where I had reached and continued from there,” he says. CRPF DIG Mathew A John flagged off the walkathon from Thiruvananthapuram.
He took to walking June 2017, covering 12,600 km so far. “I weighed 140 kg when I started, and decided to walk to shed my weight. After reducing my weight, I thought of spreading the message of walking,” says Subramanian. But something else caught his attention. The burgeoning number of deaths due to road accidents. And he decided to take a complete change in direction.
“I realised that 400 people do not come home every day. There may be a multitude of reasons for road accidents, but the statistics were shocking,” he says.
And that was how he decided to travel across the nation, bearing the message of road safety. He says he chose the difficult route for this: the NH. With 60 days of walking, he attempts to finish the walk from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and create awareness about road safety. Even during the walk, videos are being captured and after compiling the whole data, it will be submitted to the government, he says.
He expects to spend five days in Kerala, interacting with people, promoting walking and encouraging people to make constructive changes for ensuring road safety. He says promoting road safety and walking are interlinked. “Promoting walking is also road safety. If more people walk, it will be fewer vehicles on the road,” he says.
Subramanian, who was born and raised in Palakkad, is currently working in Chennai. “This is how I want to give back to the society,” he says before resuming his walk.