A lake covered in giant lotuses sits between Kumbakonam and Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. It appears in no guidebook and has no location pin. The Bengaluru-based writer behind craft studio CraftCanvas found it only because her auto-rickshaw stopped for an unscheduled break and she wandered over a raised mound. That accident, she argues, is the difference between travel and tourism — and it shapes every trip she takes across India.
Her style of travelling was forged in 2008, on a monsoon-chasing trip to Goa inspired by Alexander Frater's book Chasing the Monsoon. She joined a group of strangers on a train from Mumbai, got drenched daily, trekked to the Yana caves near Gokarna in Karnataka, drank a full bottle of toddy with comedic consequences, and slept in dorms. Those strangers ended up funding her studio, CraftCanvas, which now works with more than 30 craft traditions across India.
Since 2009 she has been hunting craft villages using a single tool: the 2007 book Handmade in India by Aditi and M.P. Ranjan. She picks a village, turns up, and asks around until someone points her to the artisan. In 2011 that meant driving to Shivarapatna in Karnataka to find stone carvers with a printed book page and a Nokia GPS that died past Kolar — a tea-shop owner solved it by sending a local boy along as guide. In 2015, arriving late in Upper Kinnaur in Himachal Pradesh, her group walked straight into a temple festival: arrack passed around as an offering to the goddess, and every married woman in the village wearing her hand-woven bridal dress and jewellery. No itinerary could have produced that.
She's honest about how much has changed. The villages she once found by word of mouth now have pins, reels and Zomato ratings; artisans run Instagram pages and WhatsApp catalogues. That's genuinely good — a phone full of orders means an artisan's daughter can afford college without waiting for a design scout to roll through. But she still insists on arriving without fixed expectations, which is how you end up fed rice, aloo posto and a share of someone's fish while hearing stories no influencer has touched.
For travellers tired of tick-box holidays, the takeaway is simple: build slack into your trip. Take the bus to the last stop, as she did in Istanbul, and eat bakery bread with the locals. Visit artisans during harvest season, when places like Hazaribagh in Jharkhand see families painting cave-painting-inspired murals on their home walls. Skip one monument for one tea stall. The sights, as the Lucky Ali lyric she lives by goes, will come to meet you — if you're slow and present enough to let them.
