A typical night can spark an atypical memory.
This month marks ten years since one of the wildest, funniest, most exhausting, most life-giving adventures of my entire life: a 30-day trip through India, half of which was spent wobbling across the northern part of the country in a glorified tin can on three wheels with two of my best friends.
The Rickshaw Run.
Jaisalmer to Shillong.
West to East.
Desert to hills.
Chaos to more chaos.
Ten years.
That number alone stuns me.
Because in the decade since that trip, so much of my life has changed that the man who took that journey and the man writing these words now feel at once like the same person and two entirely different people. Back then, I was freer in body, lighter in spirit, untethered in ways only hindsight fully understands. I had not yet met the love of my life. I had not yet stood across from Grace and known within moments that my greatest adventure was no longer somewhere out in the world but standing right in front of me. I had not yet become a husband. I had not yet become a father. I had not yet held Lizzy. I had not yet learned what it feels like to love so deeply that joy and fear can occupy the same breath.
And I most certainly had not yet heard the letters ALS attached to my own life.
But for all that has changed, some things have not.
Derek remains one of my best friends.
DaveRisner remains one of my best friends.
And that trip remains one of the clearest examples in my life of what friendship can look like when it is seasoned by years, strengthened by absurdity, and tested by dust, danger, exhaustion, laughter, and just enough insanity to keep everyone awake.
We had something special even before the trip.
Maybe that is what I feel most as I look back now. The race itself was epic. The stories were ridiculous. The scenery was unforgettable. The danger was real. But beneath all of that was something even more enduring: the chemistry. The shorthand. The trust. The way three guys from different places and different rhythms could become one moving unit, held together by affection, shared history, and the kind of laughter that can save a day from turning dark.
Before we ever rolled a single kilometer, I reached out to the producers because I was convinced — rightly, I might add — that if anyone belonged on a documentary about lunatics racing rickshaws across India, it was us.
What I sent them still makes me laugh.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Cecil Puvathingal cecilpuvathingal@gmail.com
Date: March 17, 2016 at 6:56:26 p.m. GMT-5
Subject: Re: FW: Major Worldwide Rickshaw Run TV Show
Who are you? Who are your team-mates?
We are Team AlwaysBeEpic.
I am Cecil Puvathingal. On occasion, I am The Dark Knight. My teammate is Derek Layne. On occasion depending upon altitude and humidity, he goes by Rollo. Back in October 2015, Derek & his dog Tucker drove up to Sausalito from Santa Monica to join my dog Taylor & I on a week searching for Zen. It was an epic week. And we came to a few decisions on adventuring, traveling and living.
One of the things we decided was to enter ourselves in The Rickshaw Run in April 2016. Adventurers at heart, having been in Thailand earlier in the year and in India the previous year, it only made sense for us to join the Rickshaw madness.
We posed to each other the question, “If you could have any person – living or dead, historical or contemporary, famous or no – who would that person be?” The more we talked about it, the more we knew there was only one person on the planet that needed to join us on this epic and daft adventure. He was indeed alive, quite the contemporary, not at all famous, though he should be. He is the man who…
- Once jumped out of an airplane with just a coat-hanger, and made it down with nary a broken bone.
- JJ Abrams consulted with about the TV show Lost, which he quickly dismissed as highly improbable because he would never get lost.
- Once got a brick wall to talk back. Realizing that’s just ridiculous, he decided to stop talking to brick walls.
- Inspired Roger Waters to write “Another Brick in the Wall” though Waters quickly realized he wasn’t just another brick, he was the wall.
- Took the blue pill, and lived the never-ending story.
- Took the red pill, and told Wonderland its rabbit hole was only three feet deep, enough for a Center for Ants.
- Built a Center for Ants that could also fit children so they could read good.
- Told Alice what it was like to be ten feet tall.
- Taught Ron Burgundy Spanish.
- The Most Interesting Man in the World finds most interesting.
He goes by two names, one word.
DaveRisner
Depending upon the day, DaveRisner could be This Guy or That Guy. Speaking of, the entire USA is wondering where DaveRisner is? Wouldn’t they be surprised to find him in The Rickshaw Run?
Why are you teammates good/bad company for this adventure? What would they say about you?
Well, the first thing we need to figure out is where’s DaveRisner? We have the entire USA wondering where is he? He’s not in Venice or Santa Monica or San Francisco or Sausalito or Steamboat Springs or Denver or Fort Collins or Chicago. Or is he? #WheresDaveRisner
Anyways, hoping that we #FindDaveRisner and, that being said, Team AlwaysBeEpic is perfect for this adventure. Why? At AlwaysBeEpic, we are all about living an epic life. Best friends for almost twenty years, Derek and Cecil met through their mutual good buddy DaveRisner, and have traveled around the globe living one adventure after the other connecting local artists and supporting their charitable causes. Our aim is to promote a community that connects people through creativity and thereby change the world for the better. We speak to adventurous people who want to leave their stamp on the world by lifting others up and embodying philanthropic ideals. We wholly realize the adventure has only begun. There are places to see and places to be. Come join us on our epic adventures.
Why the Rickshaw Run?
In India, we have a saying – “If not now, when? If not us, who?” I heard that in a movie once. That about sums it up, wouldn’t you agree?
What have you done like this? (adventure, travel, endurance)
Quite honestly, we’ve experienced a ton of adventures, done a lot of things, and been to many places all over the world, but have never ever done anything even remotely like this. Some people think we are doing the Cannonball Run Indian-style. Some people think we are absolutely mad. There’s no doubt we are, but that has nothing to do with the Rickshaw Run. Derek did complete the marathon in Chicago a number of years ago. Does that count as similar?
What are you most looking forward to / worried about?
Without a doubt, I am most looking forward to hanging with my best mates, traveling through my homeland in a way that no one else in my family, let alone most Indians themselves have ever done. I am looking forward to the various cities we will be visiting from Kolkata to Varanasi to Mumbai to Udaipur to Jaisalmer to Jodhpur to Jaipur to Agra to Kanpur to Lucknow to Bodh Gaya to Darjeeling to Shillong. I am looking forward to spending a couple nights in the Thar Desert. I am even looking forward to our rickshaw breaking down; and perhaps because I am looking forward to it, I won’t be upset when it happens and even get a laugh out of it. Yes, that’s what I’m looking forward to – a laugh. With Derek and DaveRisner, there are bound to be plenty of laughs. And we’ll have enough to go around.
What do you predict will happen?
Of course, we will win! No wait, we will at least finish! Hang on, we will… hmmm, perhaps Gloria Gaynor said it best? We “will survive”; yup that’s the goal. Survive. No wait, we will do much more than survive. Who are we? We are DaveRisner, Derek Layne and Cecil Puvathingal. We are That Guy, Rollo and The Dark Knight. That’s who we are! And we are gonna have a great time!
Cecil J. Puvathingal
And there it is.
Younger me, in full form.
Confident. Slightly unhinged. Sentimental. Grandiose. Earnest. Ridiculous. Hopeful. Already turning a trip into a mythology before it had even begun.
And yet reading it now, what strikes me most is not the humor, though God knows the humor still lands. What strikes me is how badly I wanted to live. How deeply I believed that friendship, travel, creativity, and shared stories could change us. How convinced I was that this thing we were about to do mattered for reasons bigger than a finish line.
And maybe that is because India has always done that to me.
India has a way of stripping away your illusions. It is beautiful and maddening, generous and unforgiving, sacred and profane, serene and utterly chaotic. It gives you sunrise over Lake Pichola and children laughing in palace courtyards. It gives you holy cities and diesel smoke. It gives you extraordinary kindness and more traffic-related terror than one nervous system should reasonably be asked to process. It gives you history, dust, hunger, color, music, noise, humanity, poverty, grace, contradiction, and life at full volume.
It also gave me something else on that trip: perspective.
There is a line I wrote years ago about Kanpur that still sits with me.
Kanpur is where my parents met. It is where they fell in love. It is, in a very real way, where my story began. And as we rolled into that city during the Run, I remember thinking about what it meant for them to leave India, to come to America, to build a life from scratch, to sacrifice everything for their children, and how impossible it would have been for teenage me to understand the weight of that fully. I understand it better now. I understand it even more as a parent. And I understand it in ways I could not have imagined ten years ago, now that I know what it is to love a child with every vulnerable inch of myself.
Back then, though, I was still mostly just a son.
A son moving through his homeland with two of his best friends.
A son seeing his country not from the backseat, but from the road itself.
A son laughing through fear and sweat and breakdowns and near-disasters.
A son beginning to understand that the places that formed you don’t stop forming you just because you left.
That trip gave me a thousand memories. Jaisalmer felt like a dream. The fort rose out of the desert like some old kingdom refusing to die. We slept under the stars in the Thar Desert with blankets pulled tight, half for warmth and half because someone had warned us about snakes and there are certain pieces of information one simply cannot un-hear before trying to fall asleep in the desert.
We decorated our rickshaw with love and nonsense and pieces of ourselves. We carried our dogs with us in spirit — Taylor, Tucker, Bella — because of course we did. We handed out hugs because we had somehow decided that if we could not be the greatest drivers to ever hit Indian roads, we could at least become known as the guys who hugged people. The Hug Guys. Team AlwaysBeEpic reporting for HUGS. It sounds absurd now. It was absurd then. It was also, strangely enough, sincere. We wanted connection. Not performance. Not irony. Not a gimmick. We wanted to leave people smiling.
And that was one of the best things about the whole trip: no matter how chaotic the roads were, how late we arrived, how exhausted we felt, how many times our rickshaw coughed like it was about to die, we were still open to wonder.
A sunrise in Udaipur.
The Taj Mahal again, somehow more beautiful the second time.
Children swarming Derek like he was a visiting dignitary.
DaveRisner becoming the legend he was always destined to be.
Pushkar giving us beauty, lunch, danger, and one very unwanted lesson about narrow roads, angry crowds, and the importance of asking forgiveness quickly and sincerely.
Jodhpur reminding us in the harshest possible terms that you do not, under any circumstances, drive at night in India unless you wish to negotiate directly with death, cows, buses, potholes, bad signage, and your own mortality.
Shillong giving us the finish line, rain, relief, and that strange sadness that only comes when something magnificent has ended and you know even while you are living it that you will spend years trying to get back to it in your mind.
I learned a lot on that trip.
Some of the lessons were practical.
Get up early.
Prepare.
Do not lollygag when the desert sun has plans for you.
Do not trust every shortcut.
Do not drive at night.
Apologize quickly.
Protect one another.
Keep moving.
Crack on.
But the deepest lessons were not logistical. They were human.
I learned that friendship can survive stress when it is built on love.
I learned that laughter is not a luxury on hard journeys; it is oxygen.
I learned that kindness travels across languages.
I learned that fear does not automatically mean stop.
I learned that being useful matters to me deeply, and when I do not know my role, I will search for it until I do.
I learned that some adventures are not valuable because they are easy or even fun in every moment. They are valuable because they reveal character — yours and the people beside you.
And I learned something that only becomes clearer with time: life itself is a Rickshaw Run.
No clean map.
No perfect roads.
No guarantee the machine will hold.
Breakdowns at the worst possible times.
Beauty appearing out of nowhere.
People helping you when you need it most.
Moments of terror.
Moments of laughter.
Moments when you are sure you are lost.
Moments when you realize you are exactly where you need to be.
And always, always, the people in the rickshaw with you matter more than the rickshaw.
That part hits me hardest now.
Because if I am honest, ten years later I am in another kind of race I never would have chosen.
Only this time the machine betraying me is my own body.
Only this time the road is not across northern India but through doctors’ offices, therapies, breathing machines, fatigue, fear, limitations, pain, and the daily reckoning that comes with ALS.
Only this time I am not asking whether the rickshaw will break down but how much more my body will ask of Grace, of me, of all of us.
And yet even here, especially here, the lessons from that trip remain.
Life is fragile.
You cannot take it for granted.
You do not wait forever to say yes to adventure, to love, to friendship, to wonder.
The people with you matter.
Humor matters.
Courage matters.
Kindness matters.
Presence matters.
And when the road is bad, and the path is uncertain, and you do not know how far the machine will carry you, you keep going with the people you love.
Ten years ago, I did not know Grace yet.
I did not know that all the roads I had taken — Chicago, the Bay Area, India, Thailand, airports, deserts, rooftops, friendships, heartbreaks, sabbaticals, dogs, prayers, longing, all of it — were in some mysterious way preparing me for her.
Preparing me to recognize her.
Preparing me to receive love.
Preparing me to become the man who would stand in front of her and know.
And now, even this chapter — the hardest one — asks something similar of me.
To keep going.
To keep loving.
To keep laughing when I can.
To keep remembering who is in the rickshaw with me.
Back then, it was Derek and DaveRisner rolling across India with me, and thank God for that. We had the time of our lives. We survived. More than that, we lived. We were young enough to be reckless, old enough to know it was ridiculous, and lucky enough to do it together. I will cherish that forever.
Now, the road is different.
Now, my greatest adventure is not a finish line in Shillong. It is the life I built afterward. It is Grace. It is Lizzy. It is the family and friends who hold me up. It is learning how to live fully inside a life I never would have scripted this way. It is discovering that courage at 55 looks very different than courage at 45, and both matter.
I look back on that trip now not with nostalgia alone, but with gratitude.
For my homeland.
For the madness.
For the hugs.
For the danger we somehow survived.
For the laughter.
For the stories.
For my best friends.
For the man I was then.
For the life that came after.
And for the strange and wonderful truth that even the most absurd roads can still lead you exactly where you are meant to go.
Go Adventure.
Go Travel.
Go Live.
Always Be Epic.
Secret of My SucCecil 