Our Life In Miles

The inception

Cliché as it sounds, it all began with a Facebook Post. When I (Vrushali) came across a post about a recently published book of poems – The Blue Letters by Danish. I was quite impressed that a fellow BITSian has published a book while still being in college. So I immediately bought it, read it, was impressed by it and so, sent him a message appreciating his poetry. To be honest, in my mind, I pictured him as some sort of a celebrity author and didn’t expect any response from him to my message. But to my surprise, he did respond and we had quite a lengthy conversation about life, passions, and many other things.

Two months of frequent chatting culminated in us going on our first date on 6th May 2018. I remember the date so vividly because it was my first near death experience 👀.
Our date was a an elaborate 19 hour – 5 part affair which started from 6AM and ended at about 1AM. We visited waterfalls, did streetfood hogging, cooked, went out for drinks, almost played TT, it was a whole deal. The visit to waterfalls also featured a life changing drowning incident, but more about that in another blog.

Over the next few weeks we went on various adventures – cycling trips, treks, cycling food trips, cooking randeazvous, what not… Within 2 months, we couldn’t have enough of each other, so we decided to move in together – in August 2018. 🤗

The consideration

The live-in helped us explore and get comfortable with various ugly and beautiful facets of each other. The covid lockdown fast tracked this exploration 😅 It took us quite some time (~2 years) and work to get really comfortable with each other’s quirks and idiosyncrasies. But apart from habits and personality traits we also intermingled our hobbies. We both had some form of sports background and general keenness towards sports and fitness. Travelling was another passion that was common. We both were very passionate and competitive in board / card games. He liked to play music, I liked to host parties. We combined these and started hosting game nights and qawwali nights. It took us quite some time to really decide that we wanted to be with each other forever. Live-in fast tracked the exploration and thereby strengthened the decision making when we finally made the decision to get married.

The union

But marriage was a tricky affair – with me being a Hindu and him a Muslim. It took me quite a lot of conversations and time to convince my mother that this was a well thought through decision. To be honest, she wasn’t ‘really’ convinced even up to a year after marriage. But she supported me nevertheless and got most of my family on terms with this idea. There was quite some drama around the actual wedding, so we had a very covert court marriage with just 4 folks attending from each side. And then threw a music night themed wedding party where the groom was the key performer 😂

The adventures

Post our marriage is when our real adventures began. With all the family members now in the know of my relationship with Danish, I could finally go on guilt-free trips with him. And we exploited this to the fullest. We travelled to a new destination every month for a full year and a half before realising we wanted more from life. Which is when we picked up some serious passion towards endurance and adventure sports. From deep sea diving , surfing and snow boarding to triathlons, mountaineering and ultra marathon swimming we cultivated new passions together. And today a few of these passions have become a major part of our lives.

Our life in Miles is a blog where we hope to share our passions and our experiences of them and build a community of like minded adventure enthusiasts through it.