RachanaDarda.

I grew up in Mumbai, in the kind of household where the encyclopaedia got more shelf-time than the television. My mother still says that even as a child, all I ever wanted was to see the world — so I suppose I manifested this life long before I understood it.

I've always thought of myself as a creative person. I studied fine arts, spent years in fashion design, and have never really put down the pen or the camera. That instinct — to notice, to compose, to find the detail others walk past — is the same one that pulls me across the world. So much of how I see a place comes from art and the artists who shaped it: the colour of a city, the line of its architecture, the way light falls on an ordinary street.

Travel, for me, has always been an extension of that creative life. I'm drawn to the things you can't photograph from the outside — how people live, what they make, what they eat. The market at dawn, the family-run kitchen, the dish that exists nowhere else: that's where a culture actually lives.