Where it all started

The thought of doing a Manali-Leh drive first occured to me when I was talking to some friends about potentially starting a travel business. The business never took off, but the trip did. This was in January 2005. After that, pretty much anyone I met, and thought might be interested, I talked about a drive trip to Leh from Manali. Now this is a trip that everyone wants to do! So everyone said "wow!" and then either decided to pursue the thought, or just feel a bit disappointed that they couldn't make it.

Around June, the people who were still interested were: Rahul, my colleague from Hughes/ Flextronics; Johri, our friend from IIT; Pawan, who is also from IIT but we had a chance meeting at CII seminar -- he was one of the people who got interested in our first conversation; Kshitij and Prashant -- my colleagues from JobsAhead/Monster; and Umesh -- who I had met earlier, but Rahul got into the fold.

We had one meeting where all these people were invited to discuss how we wanted to go about it, and that was it. However, as days passed by, some of these people began dropping out for various reasons. By the time we reached 15th July, it was me, Pawan and Kshitij who were still on. So we had to take a bus to Manali on 15th evening, along with Zuzer who was organising the trip for us. It was only our last stroke of luck that Kshitij did land up on the right day -- he had an impression that we were leaving on 16th and would have been a full 24 hours late, had we not had a chance conversation a couple of days earlier!