Dhaba owner-MTV roadies winner heads for B'wood

Young dhaba owner Ashutosh Kaushik's life has taken a U-turn since he won the just-concluded fifth season of MTV's hip adventure reality show "Roadies" last week.

New Delhi: Young dhaba owner Ashutosh Kaushik's life has taken a U-turn since he won the just-concluded fifth season of MTV's hip adventure reality show "Roadies" last week. Now he is set to try his luck in Bollywood. "I'm feeling great after winning. I am in Mumbai now and will be joining acting classes soon. I want to act in films," Ashu, as he is popularly known, said on phone from Mumbai. He hails from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh where he owns a dhaba, a roadside eatery.

The 27-year-old, who has won an expensive Hero Honda Karizma bike and Rs 230,000, unhesitatingly gives the credit of his win to his fellow contestant Sonel, by whom he was totally smitten.

Sonel, a model by profession, always stood by Ashu through the game. "Sonel was a dumb player but is more intelligent than most others on the show. She is my special friend and, yes, I still have to go on a date with her. Our relationship is very much on and I am really grateful to her," he divulged without a trace of shyness.

The show is now over and Ashu does not get to see much of Sonel but speaks to her whenever they have the time. Although he was rejected in the Delhi and Lucknow auditions, he didn't lose hope and went to Jaipur for the audition and got selected.

Being chosen was not the end of his problems. His Hindi being heavily loaded with his local area accent, it was an uphill task to communicate with his fellow contestants. "It was most difficult to make my fellow contestants understand what I wanted to say. They couldn't understand my Hindi," he said.

In the show, the selected contestants travel on bikes on a pre-decided route and are assigned difficult physical or mental tasks. A vote-out takes place at the end of the each show and whoever survives till the end is declared winner. And, of course, it's all captured on camera.

For this season, 13 contestants were chosen from across the country and Ashu, who believed in playing a slow, steady, non-controversial game, was one of them. He is riding high on his success and is happy to have made his folks back home in Saharanpur extremely proud. "For my family, I have created history by winning the show," he quipped.

On being asked whether he has plans of expanding his dhaba into a swanky restaurant, he said: "A restaurant won't do well where my dhaba is. And at the moment I am not so monetarily well-off that I can open a good restaurant anywhere."(IANS)

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