Lucky

Abhishek Gupta, now known as Lucky, left for Korea to pursue a job at Hyundai in 1996 at the behest of his father. At the time, entertainment was not on the radar, only assimilation and the urge to ge... Abhishek Gupta, now known as Lucky, left for Korea to pursue a job at Hyundai in 1996 at the behest of his father. At the time, entertainment was not on the radar, only assimilation and the urge to get rid of homesickness: “I came in the analog time; now, it’s more digitized. So, when I first came, there was no access to the Internet, no handphones, or no Google where you could search for top ten favorite restaurants or things to do. Things were a little different, and difficult, obviously.” The turnaround came purely by chance in 2000, sometime before South Korea took the global spotlight by hosting the 2002 FIFA World Cup. “When I was in university, they were looking for a foreigner who could speak Korean. They wanted a guy who could travel everywhere in Korea, eat the food, speak some Korean—they wanted to show the public how a foreigner feels in Korea,” he recalls his time on Good Morning World, the KBS show that became his first big break. Fast forward fifteen years later, and he became a member on the popular favorite Non-Summit, or Abnormal Summit, where he debated issues du jour with expats from different countries who’d made Korea their home.