Strangers no more

Harsha Bhogle shifts focus from cricket to travelling. A new show on BBC World News takes him across India. On the run he meets Mathures Paul

Taking a break from cricket, Harsha Bhogle recently travelled across India to shoot for a six-part travel show ~ Travel India ~ with a difference for BBC World News. He met strangers, whose lifestyle he had no clue about, whose language he could barely understand.
Bhogle started his journey from the desolate Rann of Kutch in Gujarat and then made his way to Bikaner. Moving on, he reached the Golden Temple in Amritsar before travelling to Kashmir where visited Wagah. Moving to a different part of India, he visited Delhi and the holy city of Benares. Without stopping, he headed towards Bihar and then to West Bengal to meet the tribes of the Sunderbans, before travelling to Hyderabad and Nashik (to take a crash course in winemaking). Harsha Bhogle speaks to The Statesman.

This is the first time you are hosting a travel show, a pleasant break from cricket commentary...
First, in live television, you don’t have time for a second take, you have to be right, or as right as possible, the first time around. And while that might seem more difficult, it makes you a different kind of person; someone who is really clued in to getting everything right. So obviously that was a challenge. Here I had to do it once, then again, then from another angle, then from another magnification, then again because someone had a hunch about another way of doing it and all along, I had no idea how it would look on air. And so I had to learn to have patience. Also I’ve travelled to most parts of India before but haven’t had the chance to explore them which I could courtesy this show. And most importantly I am not your ‘regular’ kind of host or guide doing a piece about the history, or other attractions, of a place. I am a visitor like everyone else, knowing as much or as little, and reflecting on what I see. So in that sense it was very challenging and interesting.

The six-part series takes viewers to religious sites, business hubs, places marked by poverty... How do you link the episodes to narrate one story?
We did that through voice-over so that it doesn’t look disjointed. But it is not meant to be a focussed “temples of India” kind of show. It is about normal places that a traveller would visit and it is presented from that perspective. To that extent, it is informal.

How is Travel India different from other similar shows...
Looking at these places from the perspective of a first time traveller, making your own discoveries, finding little nuances, interesting tit-bits about these places, interacting with the locals, stumbling upon their history and the place they live in and experiencing a whole lot of things along the way. So, in that sense it’s like a documentary chronicling a traveller on his journey through India. Hopefully it would provide viewers a different look at India, free of stereotypes. It doesn’t look like a packaged “places to see in India”. I hope it shows things that haven’t been seen before, from a human rather than a promotional perspective.
Hosting for BBC World and other channels... Is it difficult?
Not difficult at all because when we do cricket on other channels we are objective as well. It is not a qualification to be objective, it is a necessity. I didn’t notice any difference at all.

Some interesting things you learnt on visits to ‘often-visited’ places…
There are innumerable memories and experiences associated with this show. I went on this show with an open mind, not really sure of how I was going to go about things but we were a really good crew; that is important when you spend so many days together, and largely, I enjoyed it.

What lessons do you take back from this journey across India?
One of the things that I learnt was that there is so much to discover, so much to explore even in oft-visited places. This country provides such an amazing palette of colours, experiences, natural and historical beauty that you cannot but be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it. I think the diversity in cultures, landscapes and the human warmth you experience is completely unique and inherent to India. I realized that we know very little of our own country! I met complete strangers, whose lifestyle I had no clue about, whose language I could barely understand and who are my countrymen. I always wanted to do something like this. I had never lived in the world of documentary film-making. All I ever wanted to do was a voice-over for documentaries ~ for no reason, just a whim. I got to do that but a little more as well.