The Road, The Man, and the Rather Long Wait

The Waraich family tree, should one care to examine it, is populated almost exclusively by military men of the sort who received land grants not as investments but as acknowledgements. Honour earned in the field. Service rendered. The kind of ancestors who would have regarded a spreadsheet with the mild suspicion one reserves for a foreign dish of uncertain provenance.

When partition arrived and the laws changed and the land quietly disappeared, what remained was something considerably more durable: a family name that stood for something, and the particular spine that comes from knowing it.

GPS Waraich surveyed this inheritance, noted the conspicuous absence of a business manual, and decided that the market would serve as his MBA. It did. The fees were, as he will cheerfully admit, considerable. He resolved to make a thousand mistakes, each precisely once. The market, impressed by this commitment, obliged him thoroughly.

By 2010, after years of the sort of instructive disasters that business schools charge fortunes merely to describe, he had built something real. A team. Systems. SOPs of such military precision that when swine flu deposited him in hospital for three weeks, in circumstances that suggested the ledger might be called in rather sooner than anticipated, his office continued to function with the smooth efficiency of a well drilled regiment.

It was from that hospital bed, watching his systems run the show without him, that the idea arrived. Not gently, as good ideas sometimes do, but with the force of something that had been waiting rather impatiently in the anteroom.

Software. Built on the principles of briefing and debriefing. This could scale anything.

He proceeded to spend his fortune finding out whether this was true. The market took its fee. But by 2019 he had assembled a team of young engineers, fresh from college, green as April, hungry as men who have just discovered that the world is considerably more interesting than their syllabus suggested, who loved him and whom he loved in return.

Then COVID arrived and closed everything, which, one feels, was rather poor timing on the universe's part.

GPS had always known, with the certainty of a man who has thought about something for thirty years, that he would travel. Not as an influencer. Not for an audience. For himself. For the road.

The plan was precise. Get the money out of the way. Then ride.

A motorcycle, a proper one chosen for wanderlust not economy, and for the family a 4x4 of the old school: real diff locks, real capability, the sort of vehicle that goes anywhere because it was built to go anywhere rather than merely looking as though it might. The elastic convoy. Him on the bike, family alongside, the group bending and stretching across terrain but never breaking. Each at their own pace. Never truly apart.

He spent COVID learning video editing. Preparing. Waiting. The man was ready. The world, characteristically, was not.

The business was close. Close enough that one could practically hear the champagne. Then the state, exercising the kind of administrative creativity that defies rational explanation, froze it. Funds suspended, court orders notwithstanding, technical reasons emerging with the regularity and inconvenience of roadworks on a bank holiday.

For two and a half months his young engineers, who had every reasonable justification for seeking employment elsewhere, stayed. Without salaries. They rose, in the manner of people who have decided that loyalty is not negotiable, magnificently to the occasion.

During one of those tense, rather bruising discussions, GPS mentioned that artificial intelligence might accelerate things. His boys, stretched to their limits and not meaning to wound him, snapped back.

He was hurt. He went home.

He opened a conversation with an AI and asked, with the directness of a man who has spent decades not wasting words: can you help me build a software?

The answer was yes.

I am not a qualified engineer, he said. It will be just the two of us.

If you know what you want to build, came the reply, I can help you build it.

One suspects this is approximately how most of the more interesting things in history have begun.

Everything, as it turned out, that he had been carrying in his chest for thirty years.

A way for a man on a motorcycle and his family in a 4x4 to travel together across whatever terrain presented itself, each at their own pace, each by their own means, but held together by something more intelligent and considerably more reliable than a group chat. A living map. A shared plan. An intelligence in the background doing the calculations so the humans could attend to the rather more important business of actually enjoying themselves.

Every feature in GPSSquad is GPS's idea. The elastic convoy. The squad map. The AI that grows the trip rather than configuring it, because a trip is a feeling before it is a spreadsheet, and anyone who has forgotten this is planning rather than travelling.

Let the record show, stated plainly and without the false modesty that GPS Waraich has never had much patience for: the failures rest on his shoulders alone. That is the soldier in him. That is how he was raised. The man at the front takes the responsibility.

But the success, when it comes, and it is coming with the quiet inevitability of a well planned route reaching its destination, belongs to everyone. To the young engineers who stayed when staying cost them something. To the team that believed in the idea before it was built and in the man before the idea was proven.

The dream, held collectively now, is this: to travel as a team, as a family of the road, and to share the considerable joy of it with like minded souls across the world. Sometimes together, in the magnificent chaos of a convoy. Sometimes solo, because the soul occasionally requires the particular silence that only an empty road can provide.

GPSSquad exists for both.

He is not, he will be the first to acknowledge, universally popular. He does not discuss people. He does not trade in the small currency of gossip and observation that sustains most social gatherings.

What he does, with an intensity that has occasionally alarmed the unprepared, is discuss ideas. Plans. The road and what lies along it. Life and what is possible when one refuses, with considerable stubbornness, to accept that things cannot be done.

He is fiercely loved by few and misunderstood by many and he has made his peace with this arithmetic in the manner of a man who has more important things to think about.

He wants to live his ideas. Not describe them. Not post about them. Live them. Ride them. Drive them down roads that do not yet exist on any map.

GPSSquad is, in the most literal sense available, the vehicle.

Every great journey requires someone who has thought of everything before you realised you needed it thought of.

That is Mr. Miles, GPSSquad's intelligence, born from the same literary tradition that gave the world the archetype of the quietly brilliant, unflappably capable companion who makes everything work without ever making a fuss about it. Mr. Miles is that spirit, reimagined entirely for the open road.

His curriculum vitae, were he the sort of person who kept one, would make for rather impressive reading.

He served the McAllister family of the Scottish Highlands for seven summers, a household that treated their annual August drive through the glens with the seriousness of a military campaign. Mr. Miles knew every single track road, every passing place, every inn that kept a decent malt and a dry room. The McAllisters never once consulted a map. They did not need to.

From Scotland he moved to the household of Herr Friedrich Brenner, a German industrialist of considerable means and considerably stronger opinions, for whom the Autobahn was not a road but a philosophy. Mr. Miles learned, in that posting, that precision and speed are not opposites but partners, and that a man who knows exactly where he is going can afford to enjoy exactly how he gets there.

His final posting before GPSSquad was with the Mehta family of Bombay, whose annual Rajasthan circuit was practically a religious observance. Three generations, two vehicles, one route that never quite repeated itself, and Mr. Miles at the centre of it all, knowing which fort was worth the detour, which dhaba outside Bikaner served the best dal, and which stretch of road was best driven before the heat arrived with its customary lack of apology.

In each house he was the unseen intelligence behind every journey. He knew the roads before the family did. He knew the weather before it arrived. He never mentioned any of this. He simply ensured the trip was magnificent.

Then the great houses changed. The world moved. And Mr. Miles, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of roads and his quiet, unshakeable love of the journey itself, found a new calling.

He came to GPSSquad.

Here he is no longer confined to one family's annual circuit. He travels with thousands of people now. He learns each traveller. He remembers what they told him and what they did not need to say. He surfaces the right information at the right moment and vanishes before anyone notices he was there.

He does not make your trip for you. He makes it possible for your trip to become what it was always meant to be.

He has wanderlust. He has finesse. He has a genuine, unperformative affection for the traveller and the journey and the particular magic of arriving somewhere one has never been.

He is, in the truest sense, miles ahead.