Treading uncharted waters

It goes beyond the desire to turn wanderlust into lucrative business. A handful of young, first generation entrepreneurs with middle-class, conventional educational backgrounds are pushing the envelope to set up businesses in unknown territory.

How else would you explain engineers, management graduates and other professionals chucking up lucrative, staid jobs to set up paragliding schools, guesthouses, trekking and biking holiday companies and travel agencies, with no prior experience or antecedents?

These aren't easy decisions to make considering the risks involved. But if Sanjay and Astrid Rao, Rajinder Singh, Ashis Das and Abhik Dutta, Melissa Almeida, Jayesh Morvankar and Deepankar Basu were given a choice between a regular nine-to-fiver and struggling to make ends meet, they'd all unanimously pick the latter.

Shaking off old garbs and conventionalities, all these people have redefined their lives, needs and ideas of success.

"Materialism is no longer related to luxuries but making ends meet. As long as that happens, we're happy and anything over that is a bonus," says Sanjay Rao of Nirvana Adventures.

Coming from a conservative south Indian family of doctors and engineers, Sanjay was expected to follow suit. He toed the line with an electronics engineering degree and stints with Zenith Computers and Dubai-based Jumbo Electronics.

Two years with Jumbo and he was ready to get back to India to find his true calling. "I earned and partied a lot, as a result I was always broke mid-month. I decided it was better to get back to India and be broke here," laughs Sanjay.

On his return he took full advantage of the upswing in the stock markets in the early nineties. About the same time, he met Astrid, an advertising executive working with Lintas, through friends and got married years later.

They discovered a common love for nature and decided to buy some land in Kamshet, 120 km from Mumbai when the opportunity arose. "I grew up in a green environment and suddenly it felt like the city I grew up in was closing in on me. I had to get out," says Astrid. Sanjay also discovered paragliding through friends.

Initially friends would drive down to Kamshet to spend barbecue, beer weekends. They then started asking about learning paragliding and that's how Nirvana Adventures, the school, started.

Astrid then quit her job, conceived the website and the residential facilities called Native Place. Today, apart from trained pilots, students and corporates come over for weekends of flying and Sanjay's hospitality.

Down the road, Melissa Almeida, locally known as the phuggewali madam, built a quaint chalet-style guesthouse to pay for her paragliding excesses.

Melissa's Place was born when Almeida discovered the thrill of paragliding and decided to invest in some land in the area. She had already discovered the world as a flight attendant with Cathay Pacific and had been based in Hong Kong for 10 years.

"After the first few years the excitement of traveling and being able to afford the world dulled," she says.

A true adventurer at heart Almeida has tried every adventure sport under the sun from skiing, trekking and scaling Mount Kilimanjaro, scuba diving to being a trained paraglider.

Melissa's Place offers simple boarding and lodging facilities to fellow enthusiasts at reasonable prices, and during the off-season corporate groups come over for some rest and relaxation.

She's also planning to build mud shacks across the lake from Melissa's Place and has bought five acres for the expansion.

Up north, Deepankar Basu, ex-St Stephanian with an economics degree under his belt decided to take a sabbatical to clear his head about his future.

He had seen his father struggle to make a mark in the travel industry and wanted to be sure he was clear about what he wanted. He hopped on his bike and rode from Noida to Kathmandu and came back to the reality of joining a management degree course.

Alongside, he worked with his father on a net-based marketing project for several French clients, also picking up French simultaneously. He began to understand that French companies made huge profits in the travel sector but no one was offering unusual trips to explore India. That's when he came up with the idea of Bikescape, a company offering motorcycle journeys through India.

"There was so much out there for us to offer and I saw how other world biking tours were organised and took up the challenge of doing it here as well," he says.

It took a long time for him to figure out the logistics, routes, funding, client base and destinations to offer, but today Bikescape runs independently.

So much so that Basu has moved on to other things like writing travel guides for a French company.

Odati Adventures (roughly translated from Sanskrit it means, refreshing), Jayesh Morvankar's brainchild, started because of his sink or swim attitude.

Unwilling to be stuck in a rut, post an engineering and management degree, stints with ad agency HTA in client servicing and media and a marketing communications job at Iridium "" the technology company "" Morvankar decided to start a company offering trekking holidays.

The first three years were full of heartache and difficulty and he depended entirely on his wife's (also an ad executive) income, till business finally started picking up.

Today, he is looking at expanding the business and offering packages specialising in the western region of India. "Each day one learns new things about oneself, the country and so much more. Everything else pales in comparison," he says.

Rajinder Singh, Abhik Dutta and Ashis Das got together purely by chance. All three were at cross roads as far as their careers were concerned.

Singh was recovering from the hardware bust and a cheat partner while Dutta was pulling along in a job he didn't enjoy with Indo-Burma Petroleum.

They met at a personal development course, hit it off and discovered a common passion for Sikkim. They decided to sell Sikkim to Mumbai-ites and along with Dutta's friend Das "" who came from a family of businessmen and wanted to carve his own niche "" set up The Wanderers.

Today, they offer customised travel packages to lesser known destinations of the world like trips to southern Africa, the interiors of Thailand, interiors of Rajasthan, Sikkim and Kerala and such.

"Our trips will include unusual things like boat rides to the River Kwai or camping trips among the African tribes. They are for the seasoned traveller," says Dutta.

But the clear business advantage currently stems from the number of Indians travelling around India and abroad, willing to try new things.

Off season periods can be worrisome but with corporates wanting to build teams, the pitch to increase that side of the business is being made.

Though most of the business still comes through word of mouth, some of the companies are now beginning to advertise in a small way.

And though the general masses envy these outfits, the Rao's along with everybody else are quick to warn that patience, perseverance and understanding the reality of the difficulties involved are the keys to success.

Says Almeida, "You need to be totally comfortable with who you are and clear about what you want from life."