Never before has a dhaba lunch meant so much.

It's not because we stopped at 'Murthal Super Dhaba' 70 kms from Delhi, definitely not because we were in Murthal which has THE best parathas ever on GT road.

We were in Kosi near Mathura making the first of many, many pit stops on our 60 day drive across India. Yes, we're well on our way on this journey but as I write this, I can hardly believe it myself- NDTV is paying me and four other colleagues to not just travel to one region in India but to drive to every state that matters (or those that are physically possible) and find out from the ground, all the buzz about elections! Why am I losing my sleep with excitement? Because with newsroom budgets being tight across the world, political reporters consider themselves lucky to travel to one state or one region during elections. And I've always been told by wiser colleagues that the key to calling an election is an old fashioned one - talking to large numbers of people on the ground and figuring out if there is a wave for and against a particular party, or (the more tougher one) if there is indifference either way.

I thought I was lucky that I spent several weeks in Gujarat before the 2007 elections and then in Madhya Pradesh during the last assembly polls but this assignment is the mother of them all! NDTV India's Nagma Sahar, Producers/ Camerapersons Nishant and Mursalin and I are piling on to a mobile studio and travelling to a new place every day. Taking us thousands of kilometres is the Election Express which is equipped with everything else we need to get our show on air. It doesn't matter how remote an area you live in, the Election Express will make sure that your voice, your opinions about your vote, your aspirations will be broadcast to audiences across the country and the world.

But it's not been easy planning something as ambitious as this. How do you cover a country as large as ours in the course of five-phase elections? The election commission certainly doesn't make it easy. They've made sure that places going to polls in the first phase are as spread out as possible. So in Chattisgarh, Kerala, and most of the North-East polling would be over by April 16th (then again, the EC's job certainly isn't to make ours easier). So we had to take a few tough calls. We prioritised and decided on a route that we think would give the best coverage of general elections. It's also the route to see some of the most exciting parts of the country, parts that I'd certainly read in newspapers, talked about in my news bulletins but never actually experienced. I will be travelling to the poorest and most drought prone district in the country, the recession hit region in an otherwise economically successful state, going to meet farmers who have now apparently taken to drinking wine with their roti and discover the phenomenon that is Chiranjeevi. I could go on and on about all the places that we're going to discover but I've arrived at Bharatpur. Bayana of Bharatpur and adjoining Dausa, was the centre of the most shocking agitation to hit Rajasthan and the country - the agitation that held up main railway lines with the bodies of dead protestors. Their agitation eventually got nowhere but will their vote matter? Tune in to find out. The journey has just begun.