TLI Staff
Keshav Chaturvedi is a communications professional; photographer by hobby; and a traveler at heart. He has recently launched an audio travel show Tedhe Medhe Raaste with a podcast major- IVM Podcasts – where he narrates his travel experiences in India and abroad. In an interview with Top Lead India, he talks about more than two decades of his travel and the impact it had on him.
Q: What does travel mean to you?
A: Travel to me is a process of discovery, not only of the place but of my own being. I don’t travel to unwind. It’s always more than that. It’s like leaving behind in the city I live in, and immerse myself in the place I visit. I want to experience the place, the people and their lives. For me it’s cathartic. At one level I am connected to them; at another, I am detached enough to see the larger picture and spot something unique in their life which they fail to recognize.
Travelling offers you a chance to be in a place and among people where you have practically no stakes. You are at best a visitor, who will leave in a stipulated time. This realization liberates you completely and helps you drop your judgement. The newness of the place and relative anonymity, forces you to move out of your comfort zone and remain alert to even the slightest change in people’s behavior, cultural mores and smallest idiosyncrasies – and that is the time you are alive to unlimited possibilities.
Coming back to your question, travel for me is an intense experience of discovery – of a place and an awareness of the self.
Q: Why a travel podcast and not a YouTube video, which is more common?
A: YouTube is no doubt a very popular medium and visuals are always more appealing to people than words or voice. But I found podcast an equally engaging platform for several reasons. I had accumulated many travel stories and experiences over the last two and a half decades. Unfortunately I lost many photographs over the years of the many places I had visited, so visuals were not possible. But more importantly, most of my stories are not so much about the place or a city per se; they were more about what I felt or experienced in that moment. And to share and showcase these stories and impressions, I felt that a podcast was a better medium.
I have been a journalist for a long time and writing was not new to me. But these podcasts served to expand my reach, allowing me to synergize my abilities of reading, processing, writing and then voicing my experiences.
Q: What do you want to achieve with your podcast Tedhe Medhe Raaste?
A: Through my travel podcasts, I want people to be inspired enough to go out and start travelling, that’s for sure. But more than that, I want people to be more alive and alert when they travel and learn to be with the place they are visiting.
What I also want through these podcasts is to share my personal experiences with people. These are stories that need to be told – stories related to small little nuggets of information, a chance encounter, a gesture of kindness, that reaffirm your belief in the goodness of humans. I am confident that these stories will help people broaden their horizon. It will also inspire them to undertake their own journeys of adventure, which will enrich them immensely.