Garlanding India - One man, one car, 24 NGOs, 14000 km

XLRI professor Uday Damodaran is on a mission now-a-days. He’s travelling across the country in his prized Renault Duster over a period of 60-days (April 26, 2014-June 25, 2014) to raise funds for NGOs.

“The journey, outlining India’s borders, looks like a garland on the map of India. Hence the name Garlanding India,” he says.

Getting in touch with Uday was a task in itself. Travelling at remote locations, his phone is often out of coverage. After a week of exchanging mails and broken calls due to poor network, I finally managed to talk to him at length.

“I love travelling. So last year, in my Duster, I drove from Jamshedpur to Bangalore, then to Bangalore to Kochi and finally Kochi to Goa. I outlined my journey on the map of India and put it up on Facebook. It looked like a hockey stick. And then someone asked me, why did you stop? Why didn’t you carry on and complete the entire circle? That is when I started thinking about going across the entire country.

“The idea slowly started forming. About 15 years ago, some of my friends started an NGO in Ladakh. After graduating from XLRI, they went on a bike trip. They chucked their corporate jobs and started an NGO for local tribes. So, the initial plan was to drive to Ladakh and raise money for them. Then it struck me, people in other parts of the country may not connect with an NGO in Ladakh. Therefore, I decided to include many more NGOs working for different causes. A bunch of my students also helped me in shortlisting the NGOs.

“But the question was how can people donate. Then I started creating a website platform. The idea was to drive traffic to the website and get people to donate. Creating the website took a little time. So I started a Facebook page, which caught on pretty well,” says Uday.

Uday is travelling solo most of the time. Sometimes for a particular stretch, his family, students and friends join in. “In the Srinagar-Leh trip, quite a few people wanted to accompany us. We had three cars for the journey,” recalls Uday.

For the first thirty days, Uday never stayed in a hotel. “At every destination, there was a friend or a relative or a friend’s relative. On Day 20, I bought my first meal from a hotel. Even meals were provided by my well-wisher,” he says.

It is always interesting to meet people and encounter new stuff. Uday’s journey is full of anecdotes. He says, “Wherever I went, people struck a chord. After hearing my story, a chai shop in Gujarat refused to take any money from me. At a petrol pump in Sitapur, the owner invited me for a cup of tea in his office. In another instance, four strangers – young bikers – rode along with me from Kanyakumari to Trivandrum. Every day is different.”

Day 18 of Garlanding India, Surat to Bhavnagar NGO: Gram Vikas Trust

He also has a message for MBA students: “MBAs all over the world tend to become boring. They become convergent and narrower in their outlook. Guys who were very interesting before an MBA, they all talk in the same language after an MBA. There’s a language that you talk on the road – a language that you talk to everyone. It’s so different and diverse. Travelling teaches you to be tolerant, to be open to other ideas. Whether an MBA or not, those are the qualities that everyone should have.”

Uday Damodaran teaches finance courses at XLRI Jamshedpur. He is also a visiting faculty at IIM Udaipur.

Associated NGOs

Track Uday’s vehicle here.

To donate, visit his here.

Visit Garlanding India FB page here.