My 8-year-old thinks I have no chill. Her friends go to South Korea and come back with those plastic anime toys. They go to Paris and eat croissants at a café that is famous on Instagram. They go to a Scandinavian country for a white Christmas. And here I am, telling her that our next vacation is a trip to Hazaribagh in Jharkhand to visit artisans who paint cave painting-inspired murals on the walls of their homes during the harvest season. No wonder she believes I am the root of all her woes!But I have always travelled differently.In 2008, I was still in my corporate job. At a party, I met a friend’s friend. A week later, she asked if I would be interested in a monsoon trip to Goa, inspired by British travel writer Alexander Frater’s book Chasing the Monsoon: A Modern Pilgrimage Through India (2011, Picador). We would take a train from Mumbai, meet her other friends, and drive down the coast chasing the rain. I said yes to a trip with strangers built around a book about weather.It has been by far the best trip of my life. We were drenched throughout. I drank a full bottle of toddy because I didn’t know what so much of the innocently sweet-tasting thing would do and I laughed for three hours straight. We trekked up Yana caves in Gokarna, Karnataka, pulled our car out of muck, slept in dorms. Those people are my family now. If not for them, there would be no CraftCanvas, my design studio that works with over 30 craft traditions across India and brings artisanal work into contemporary spaces. They were the first ones to pull out their cheque-books to say, ‘Go live your dream. We’ve got your back.’