ARABIAN TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Some people wait for the “right time” to travel, after the promotion, after the target, after the mortgage is paid off. Shiju George never bought into that timeline. Over the past two decades, he has built a serious career in technology sales and business development while quietly stacking up nearly 95 countries across six continents and more than 100,000 kilometres of road travel, proving that a demanding career and a restless sense of wanderlust don’t have to cancel each other out.
Born in Kerala and raised between North Delhi and Rajasthan, Shiju came from an engineering background before his career path led him to Mumbai, a city he credits with teaching him resilience and the ability to keep moving when things get uncomfortable. Today he holds a regional sales and business development leadership role at an American technology company in the artificial intelligence space, a world built on strategy, targets and cross-border relationships. Running parallel to that professional life has been a second, less conventional pursuit: curiosity for its own sake.
What started as ordinary sightseeing, landmarks, photos, a checklist of destinations, evolved into something else entirely. As the country count climbed, Shiju found himself losing interest in ticking off famous sites and gaining interest in people, food, language and the small, unscripted moments that never make it into a guidebook. Somewhere in that shift, travel stopped being about vacations and started being about perspective.
That’s also why he’s drawn to road trips rather than flights. Driving, he says, reveals what exists between destinations, the villages, the roadside dhabas, the conversations that could never have been planned. For Shiju, a wrong turn is rarely a problem; it’s often the best part of the trip. He doesn’t treat his 95-country tally as a trophy case. A stamp in a passport, he points out, only proves you entered a place, it says nothing about what you understood while you were there.
What stays with him instead are the unplanned moments: a stalled car fixed by strangers, a meal at someone’s kitchen table, a plan that fell apart and turned into a better story. Interestingly, Shiju sees no real divide between his corporate life and his travelling one. The same instincts, curiosity, adaptability, listening before assuming, staying calm in unfamiliar territory, serve him equally well closing a deal and navigating a border crossing.
He documents these journeys, along with the lessons behind them, on his personal travel platform, The Lost Mumbaikar, where road trips, solo adventures and family travel stories sit alongside broader reflections on why he travels the way he does. His guiding philosophy is captured in three words: Dream. Dare. Do. Dream beyond comfort, dare beyond fear, act before doubt sets in. It’s a mindset that carried him from an engineering classroom into a global tech career, and from a single curious trip into nearly a hundred countries, with plenty of road still left to cover.
