Twenty-two-year-old biker Rohith Subramanian has been on a cross-country solo ride for the past 148 days. He has traveled a whopping 31,900 km, covering all the states and Union Territories in India. Hyderabad is his last stop before hitting his hometown, Chennai.
It all started when he read an article about a 40-year-old American who had a life full of regrets. He knew that his life could not be like that. “When I look back at my life, I’d want to have a story to tell,” says Rohith, aka The Lone Wanderer.
Rohith never stays in hotels. He either asks people on social media to host him or knocks on strangers’ doors, and not once has he been turned down. “I knocked on a door in Kashmir once. The man there had a room where he prayed. He gave me food and I spent the night there,” he says.
Riding around the country alone is not an easy task. At Baltal, Kashmir, Rohith was stuck in a snow slide. “The slide lasted for 10 minutes and I had to claw my way out of the snow for four hours,” he says.
Rohith not only rides for passion but also for a living. His journey started with crowd funding, but soon all his necessities were taken care of by sponsors. He even gets paid by a men’s grooming company to grow a beard!
He continues to achieve his dream by doing odd jobs like selling chai or vada-pav. “As kids, when people asked what we wanted to become, everyone said doctor, engineer or pilot. I wanted to be a chai-wala. That was my dream,” said Rohith.
Rohith has given a TEDx talk and the first draft of his book is ready. He is now gearing up for his next road trip, in Europe across 46 countries. He plans to cover one lakh km in one year.
