Vijay Menon - A Brown Man in Russia

Vijay Menon is an American author, statistician, and backpacker. His TED talk, Lessons Learned on the Trans-Siberian, garnered acclaim as he described his unique experiences traveling through Russia as a person of color. This culminated in his debut novel, A Brown Man in Russia, in which he provides a lens into a Siberian winter from the perspective of a total outsider and relates subsequent lessons. In addition to Russia, Vijay has traveled to more than 50 countries in six continents over the past five years ranging from Zimbabwe to Taiwan. He graduated with dual degrees in Statistics and Economics from Duke University. Vijay has been published in the Economist, is a Duke Debate champion, and had his winning submission on global sustainability forwarded to President Barack Obama's desk by the United Nations following their national essay contest. Prior to entering the tech industry, he worked on the Battery 500 project at IBM, performed mass spectrometry research to discover cancer biomarkers at UC Davis, helped implement micro-consignment for entrepreneurs in Guatemala, and served as a low latency data analyst for teams in the National Basketball Association. Vijay currently resides in Silicon Valley working at Scribd, the Netflix for books, as the senior product manager lead having previously completed stints at both Microsoft and Dropbox.

December 13, 2013

London, England Moscow, Russia

When I was a child, my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas. It took no time for me to respond I requested the Nintendo 64 game Banjo-Kazooie.

I woke up on Christmas morning with a distinct feeling of anticipation in my gut. I sprinted downstairs at the crack of dawn and fidgeted impatiently by the tree, eagerly waiting for my parents to rouse. After a seemingly interminable wait, they finally emerged.

Go ahead, my mom offered. Open it.

The words seemed so sweet at the time. Tearing apart the wrapping paper, I felt a surge of dopamine as I pulled out my prize. Lo and behold, what was in my hands?

A National GeographicAtlas.

Ah, my mom offered with faux remorse. Looks like Santa was unable to pick up Banjo-Kazooie this time around. My face dropped, as my Dad offered a consolatory, Maybe next year?

And in that moment, Santa Claus was dead to five-year-old me.

The bitterness of that event is not lost on me, but time has mostly dissipated the raw wounds of December 25, 1998. In its place, a countervailing emotion began to incubate namely, one of appreciation.

Because on that day, my parents inculcated upon me an unconditional love for travel that has carried with me throughout my life.

As I grew up, I became fascinated by learning more about the world around me. I read voraciously, becoming enamored with trivia and Geography Bees*. I hauled around a tub of global facts supplemented by recent article clippings from the Economist, devised spontaneous lists of top-ten vacation destinations la Conde Nast, and proudly announced my ambitions to aspire to future ambassadorship.

All the while, I had never so much as set foot in neighboring Canada.

So though I could rattle off the name of each world capital with relative ease including all three of South Africas I always felt as a child that actually visiting them was somehow out of reach.

As I entered adolescence, however, that misplaced belief slowly melted away. Tinkering on the Internet, I developed a penchant for travel hacking scraping error fares, spotting the best routes, and snagging the cheapest flight deals. For the first time in my life, the pages on the Atlas began to come to life.

And I explored the world one flight at a time.

It started small at the onset. But the real turning point was a solitary trip to Guatemala the summer after my freshman year of college at Duke University, living with a host family and sponsoring micro-consignment for local entrepreneurs.

Upon my return, I recall for the first time experiencing a sensation distinctly different than anything I had ever encountered before. Rather than refreshed and rejuvenated, I felt strangely unfulfilled and unsettled like I didnt quite want to be back.

My exploratory itch had become insatiable, and I hungered for more.

Nay.

I demanded it.

Fast forward to the summer of 2013.

That June, as I lounged in my grandparents residence in Calicut, India for a week before starting a new job at Microsoft, an ineluctable idea planted itself inside my head. I couldnt tell you where it came from, or how it first appeared only that it was there and that I couldnt stop ruminating on it.

Mongolian Christmas.

Fifteen years to the day of my most crushing childhood disappointment, I felt an irrepressible desire to find myself in the country that I had first learned about in my initially unappreciated but now cherished National GeographicAtlas. And so an innocent Google search morphed into hours spent on Seat61.com**, and an incipient idea soon transformed into a burning desire.

Over a quick Skype call, I pitched my plan to the only people I knew would immediately be receptive my Duke roommate Jeremy and our fellow classmate Avi.

The two made ideal travel partners, albeit for different reasons. Jeremy, a Knoxville-bred man, possessed not only the appearance but also the qualities of a 19th century frontiersman intrepid and gritty, with a gnarly red beard to match. Avi, on the other hand, retained an unbelievably laid-back nature that belied his fast-paced Jersey roots so much so that one could be forgiven for wondering whether he could more aptly be described as carefree or careless.

The Trans-Siberian Railway? Mongolian Christmas? Say no more.

It was unanimous. We were going to take the train across Russia, through the Siberian tundra, and down into the ancestral home of the Khans. And we were going to do it smack in the heart of winter.