The beauty of dawn breaking over some unfamiliar road is as chastening an experience. Such a road disappears when your instincts take over and the map. On Himachal hills, you are on a dirt road. In the Thar desert, maybe a dry, twisting track. It is as if each step ahead is the solution to something you never knew you had.
And that’s travel, is it not? Not a list of what to see or do and a race to reach predetermined locations, but a slow revelation of who you are when no one is looking. It’s the craft of getting lost and never being found and finding something in the way. But there is a small secret that no one talks about: The biggest breakthroughs are not necessarily created in open air. They are made on television sometimes.
No, not the scroll-until-you’re-numb kind of screen. I’m talking about digital spaces that mirror real journeys—playful ones, risky ones, absurdly philosophical ones. Like when I stumbled upon the oddly satisfying Valor Chicken Road game during a rainy night stranded in a mountain hostel with no signal and exactly 3% battery left. Don’t ask me how the game loaded. Maybe it was divine Wi-Fi intervention. Maybe the universe knew I needed a weird little reminder about timing, risk, and the hilarity of existence.
Picture this: a digital chicken trying to cross the road without becoming dinner. Ridiculous? Entirely. But somewhere between the jumps and near-misses, I saw a metaphor unfolding. Isn’t that us? Perpetually hesitating, then leaping, hoping we’re not flattened by what comes next?
When Life Becomes a Coin Toss (and You Learn to Flip It Anyway)
There was greater struggle on the roads in actual life. I have just left my “safe job” and am freelancing, which isn’t always safe. The plan? Press on until the map starts to fade. I slept on buses, split thalis with strangers, and wrote half-poems on the margins of train tickets. I am romantic on Instagram.
Real life is messy. It was then that I began to notice a strange connection between games and travel. Both make you think about risk. Both like that you wing it. They both can make you feel powerful and stupid at the same time, for five minutes.
You know how it is when you are trudging along a trail and there’s rain falling randomly? You don’t know if you should laugh or weep. When I curled up in my soggy sleeping bag and tallied up how many rupees I had left to spend on dal and chai, I was that way watching my virtual chicken dodge through traffic. It was silly. And it was marvelous.
Why We Keep Moving (and Sometimes Stand Still)
I once met a shepherd near Tirthan Valley who told me, “If the goat fears the path, it will still have to walk it.” He wasn’t talking about courage, not exactly. He was talking about inevitability—about how hesitation doesn’t save us, it just makes the crossing longer.
I think about that every time I pause too long before booking the next ticket, writing the next pitch, or crossing a proverbial road—whether in life, travel, or a game. Because standing still is safe. But safe rarely tells a good story.
It’s in motion that we get bruised and brilliant. It’s in motion that we find out how far we can actually go.
What Travel Has in Common with Play
You can plan a route. You can book your hostels and track your calories and pack just the right pair of waterproof socks. But at some point, the road will throw a surprise. A protest shuts down the only highway. A stranger invites you into their home. A monsoon floods your plans.
And you? You adapt. You laugh. You maybe cry a little into your momo. But you keep going.
Just like in any game worth playing, the goal isn’t perfection. It’s presence. It’s showing up, even when you’re terrible at it. It’s learning the rules just well enough to start breaking them with charm.
Whether it’s a real-life mountain pass or a goofy chicken dodging disaster on a screen, both challenge you to react, to stay alert, to not take yourself too seriously.
What’s the Point of It All?
Maybe none. Maybe all of it.
Maybe travel is just an excuse to find versions of yourself you wouldn’t meet at home. Maybe games are just miniature models of the same journey—packaged in pixels, but real in their own odd way. Perhaps we seek stories because they are the only thing that never depreciates.
And perhaps, and no more than perhaps, it is acceptable not to know everything.
As much as it counts, whether you’re scaling through the Himalayas on some harebrained scheme or hair-trigger bounding through a pixelated highway game, you’re learning the same thing: move forward even if you have any clue where it will go.
Just don’t forget to enjoy the scenery along the way.
#Himalayas & #Northeast
Cinephile, Misanthrope, Anti-selfie
Atlas Obscura/Mint/Discover India
