100 Not Out

Before they fly off to yet another country, Anu Prabhakar chats up three Indian members of the exclusIve travelers century club.

Kiran Oza’s anecdotes have a fairy-tale quality that is oddly comforting—his travels around the world centre on the kindness of strangers. “My wife and I met a medical student on the train in Bucharest, Romania,” he says. They had asked her for directions to their hotel. She, instead, convinced them to stay at her student quarters for free. The three of them continue to keep in touch—she’s even visited the Ozas at their home in Bhavnagar, Gujarat. “She still doesn’t know our names; she calls us mummy and daddy,” he laughs.

Oza remembers breaking his ekadashi fast some years ago at the house of a restaurant owner in Nairobi, Kenya, who insisted on cooking him a vegetarian feast. Once, he even unwittingly lunched with the kind wife of the defence minister of an African country.

A childlike enthusiasm to initiate conversations with strangers—often to the point of being gregarious —and a childhood love for geography have helped the intrepid traveller navigate his way through an astonishing 153 countries.

Oza is the longest-serving Indian member of the exclusive Los Angeles-based Travelers’ Century Club (TCC), a networking platform for prolific travellers who have been to more than 100 countries and territories. TCC’s list recognises 327 of them. They have six members from India and going by the universally accepted UN list, a confirmed four have travelled to more than 100 countries.

TRAVELLING IN THE ’80S