About
In 2020, at home during the COVID lockdown, Nadir Nibras took an older English vlog about the countries Bangladeshis can visit without a visa and remade it in Bengali. It went viral, and he says that was when he got his break. The Bangladeshi filmmaker works under the brand name Nadir On The Go, which spans several channels. The Bangla one, Nadir On The Go - Bangla, was created in October 2020 and had about 2.37 million subscribers by October 2026. Since then he has given up an engineering PhD to focus on travel, collected a run of Bangladeshi creator awards and, in 2026, appeared on Netflix with the American creator Drew Binsky in an episode about Dhaka's traffic.
A Dentist's Son From the North
Nibras was born in Dinajpur, in northern Bangladesh. His father was a dentist in government service, so much of his childhood was spent in a succession of northern districts. The family moved to Dhaka after about 2000, and he took his O and A Levels at an English-medium school there.
Travel was part of family life. His parents took the family abroad roughly once a year and around Bangladesh every couple of months, and he credits his own habit to those trips. He names a 1997 family trip to Singapore as his first look at somewhere unlike home, and he often visited Chattogram with his family as a boy. In his own telling, he wanted to see the world from childhood and grew up planning for it.
Engineering Degrees, Trips Between Terms
At the start of the 2010s Nibras went to the United States for university and earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. He went on to a PhD in biomedical engineering and, along the way, completed a master's in data science and electrical engineering. In 2013 he spent a semester at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, which he counts as his first trip to Europe.
His research jobs left room for trips during study breaks, and Prothom Alo reported that a friendly supervisor encouraged him to take weeks off. He describes those years as study and work in engineering and applied mathematics, with as much travel as he could fit in on the side. In all, he says, he spent ten years in the US.
Mexico Footage and a Channel for Friends
Filmmaking arrived by accident. Nibras told ICE Today in December 2021 that about five years earlier he had started editing action-camera footage from a trip to Mexico, purely for fun, and had never stopped. He dates the discovery of his "biggest passion," filming the places he visited, to 2016. On 17 December 2016 he uploaded the first video to a YouTube channel called Nadir On The Go, a name he chose after trying out several others because he wanted something unique and catchy.
The goals were modest. He says the channel was meant to keep memories for himself and show friends and family new places, with no ambition to become influential or earn a living. After two years it had about 25 videos and around 100 subscribers, most of them people he knew. Two years later the count stood at about 200.
The summer of 2018 changed how he saw the road. He moved through about 30 cities in more than 100 days, his first fast-paced solo trip longer than a month, and told The Daily Star it made him realise "this is the life I always wanted to have."
A Lockdown Video in Bangla
Lockdown gave him time. He spent it watching travel videos and, he says, sharpening his filmmaking. The video that changed things was a Bengali version of an older English vlog on the 48 countries a Bangladeshi passport holder could visit without a visa. It passed 2 million views on YouTube and drew more on Facebook. That same year he began living out of a backpack as a digital nomad, he says.
Recognition at home came fast. In 2021 he won the travel category of the Marvel of Tomorrow Influencers Award. The Channel i Digital Media Awards named him Best YouTube Content Creator in 2021 and 2022, and The Daily Star's Blender's Choice OTT & Digital Content Awards named him Best Content Creator (Travel Vlog) in the same two years. Around the middle of 2022 he decided not to continue his PhD and to concentrate on travel, as he told Prothom Alo that December.
The following February a fan meet-up in Dhaka drew coverage from Somoy TV, Channel 24, Jamuna TV Plus and the Dhaka Tribune. Euronews Albania and Romania's Observator News featured him too. In 2024 Blender's Choice honoured him again, and the TikTok Bangladesh Creator Awards named him Creator of the Year.
Filming Everything Twice
Besides the Bangla channel, the brand includes an English-language main channel, Food On The Go and Nadir On The Go - Extras. Nibras films every spoken scene twice, first in English and then in Bangla, and avoids voice-overs, with two rare exceptions. In 2022 he was still scripting, filming, editing and uploading on his own, with occasional help on subtitles and thumbnails. He still writes every script, travels solo, shoots and does most of the editing, but the wider operation now relies on a team working across platforms. On the Bangla channel the result ranges from travel and country-history documentaries to budget trips and street food, with prices framed in taka and explainer series on a city's history and politics.
His travel is slower than his output suggests. He often stays one to three months in a place and reads books before he goes. By his estimate only 10 to 20 percent of his year goes on active travel and filming. The rest is work from stable bases such as Sri Lanka, Serbia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Belgrade, which he first visited in 2021, became his favourite city and the place he feels most at home, he says.
By late 2022 he had taken viewers into the Amazon rainforest and to Hawaii, handled live snakes and swum with sharks, and he spoke openly about the fear behind that last one. In early 2023 NTV put his count at more than 70 countries. For a project titled "100 hours around the world," he relied on an existing US visa so he could stop over in places such as Singapore and Saudi Arabia without visa applications. Not every moment made the edit. At Caye Caulker in Belize, he recalls, the group he was with lost a paddle near three crocodiles. They got back safely, but the incident never reached the final cut.
Loss, Refusals and a Growing Audience
In May 2024 Nibras told his fans that his mother had died and asked for privacy. Speaking to The Daily Star in June 2025, he said the loss was the main reason he now puts his own well-being ahead of chasing career milestones. Of the nomadic life itself he said, "I wouldn't trade it for anything," though he counts less time with close friends and family as its biggest sacrifice. In the same interview he called the July Uprising the most significant event of his lifetime as a Bangladeshi, said he was optimistic, and hinted at a major journey that no one from Bangladesh had done before.
Five years after a visa video gave him his break, the subject returned in harsher form. In a video posted on 27 July 2025 he said that seven of the 17 countries he had applied to over the previous year had refused him a tourist visa. As the Dhaka Tribune reported, Bahrain turned down an e-visa although he held US and Schengen visas, and Italy kept his passport for six to seven weeks before refusing a Schengen visa. Other applications succeeded, bringing him a three-year visa for Australia and a two-year visa for the UK. He told viewers that his earlier visa video had gone out of date almost at once, that a previous visa-related video had drawn negative messages, and that he did not plan to make more on the topic.
The audience kept growing. The Bangla channel had passed 1.4 million subscribers by May 2024, and by October 2026 it held more than 1,400 videos with over 200 million views. His 2026 uploads ran from a Belfast series and Tbilisi food episodes in August to a near-daily October series from Kuwait City, billed as the world's hottest city, where he tested cooking an egg on a car in 50°C heat.
Dhaka Traffic on Netflix
In November 2025 Nibras filmed in Dhaka with Drew Binsky, the American travel creator. The original video on Binsky's channel drew nearly 6 million views in ten months. Nibras appears with Binsky in the 12th episode of the "Best Of" season of Drew Binsky: Ultimate Traveler on Netflix, titled Surviving the World's Deadliest Traffic. He announced the feature on his Facebook page, and The Business Standard reported it on 30 September 2026.