Vinod Kapri, a filmmaker and author, shared a video that quickly went viral on social media. The video depicts Kapri, who is driving a car, interacting with a boy who is sprinting on a road in Noida at night. The filmmaker, presumably out of curiosity, slows down his car and approaches him.
“This is GENUINE GOLD.” I saw this boy running on a Noida road with a bag on his shoulders around 12 a.m. last night. I figured since he was in trouble, I should offer him a ride.
However, he turned down my offer. “You’ll fall in love with him when you find out why he said ‘no’ to taking the lift,” the filmmaker and journalist said on Twitter.
“Come on, I’ll drop you,” Kapri says, to which the ‘sprinter’ responds that he wants to keep running. When prodded, he says he only goes for work like this, and that he works at a McDonald’s in Sector 16.
However, the National Award winner is adamant about assisting the boy. On this, the latter finally reveals why he’s running down the street in the middle of the night: he wants to join the army.
Pradeep Mehra, who claims to be from Uttarakhand’s Almora, declines one final offer to accept the lift, explaining that he runs at night because he has to wake up early for duty and cook food in the morning.
He tells Kapri he is 19 years old and that he runs for 10 kilometres every day from Sector 16 to Barola. When Kapri jokes that the video will go viral, Pradeep laughs and says that no one will recognize him, and that even if it does, he doesn’t care because he isn’t doing anything wrong.
Pradeep also declines a final offer to eat at Kapri’s house. This, he claims, is due to the fact that he must return home and prepare food for his older brother, who works night shifts. The conversation concludes with the boy telling the director of ‘Pihu’ that he cannot accept the lift because running is a part of his daily routine and he does not want to disrupt it.
“All the best,” Vinod Kapri says at the end of the 140-second clip. He posted a follow-up video after the video, as expected, went viral.