럭키

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.