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Kavya Saxena, whom you’d probably know better as @crazyfeetkavya on Instagram, has been travelling solo through rural India since 2 October, 2020 and has clocked 118 days already on road with her Mahindra, lovingly called ‘Shakti’. After 9 long years of surviving the corporate treadmill in one of the top Fortune 500 companies, as well as heading interesting brands like @treeofliferesorts @canvaslaughclub @vajor and others, she finally bid farewell to corporate life and started on the journey of a lifetime. Hailing from Jaipur, Rajasthan, Kavya had always been interested in the indigenous arts and crafts of rural India, which made her often engage in projects related to the same. But juggling both a full time job, along with her passions proved too much for her. Hence, It was during the lockdown that she took the plunge and left the confines of conventional life to embark on a career that would change her forever. Her chief motivation was none other than getting to know the grassroots of this country down to the very detail.
Kavya had been associated with motorsports since 2014 and has briefly worked on several short term assignments with Isuzu and Mercedes; so, it was a cakewalk for her to drive through the interiors of rural India for days at a time. However, “shooting while driving is very tough, and it is one of the reasons you find less of my own pictures on Instagram,” confesses Kavya. “I’m trying to be consistent and keep my set of niche audience updated on Instagram and Facebook, but long videos/ content will have to wait for a while.”
Check out her #handmadeindia reels on Instagram.
Kavya has already clocked over 30,000 Km. through Bengal, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Burma. Currently travelling in Odisha, she reminisces the raw, unreal beauty of the villages in Arunachal, which are till date, completely unexplored. She talks about “the textiles that are bartered amongst their own community and never see the light of the market”, homemade beer, as well as the kitchen gardens cultivated by every tribe of the region.
“While Arunachal taught me diversity, Nagaland cleared many myths,” says Kavya, who stayed with the Head of the Village in Mon, the heartland of the fierce Konyaks, famously called the headhunters.
“I would go fishing in rivers with the locals. I even trekked to a village which had never seen a local face before,” reveals Kavya.
While travelling in North-East India, she had put up her base at the bustling metropolis of Calcutta, where she was enamoured by the zari workers of Topsia and the European castles of Dhanyakuria. Overtime, the peripheries of the north-eastern regions caught her attention more than the cities.
While she is at this strenuous but extremely fulfilling journey, she is often met with the usual obstacles like getting lost, driving through bad roads, language barriers as well as the not-so-comfortable stays at highway hotels, but she never lets that lower the spirit of her Quest. “I have given myself this task to take this journey just like someone would attend their job, get up, drive, reach, assimilate, process,” says Kavya. Even though people are often skeptical about her impulsive escapade of having left a well-paying job in the midst of a lockdown, she believes that it has been the best decision, since it is only by slowing down and enjoying the moment that we can hope to navigate the crisis in the world right now.
As of now, she has met most of her travel expenditures alone, but plans to conduct a crowdfunding campaign for the second phase of her journey. In the meantime, she wants to bring forth into prominence the artisans of rural India and their crafts through her storytelling.
At times, she does get overwhelmed at the deluge of information that comes her way while exploring a particular place, in which case she carries multiple journals to jot them down. Names of villages, motifs, local food dishes, crafts etc. regularly find their way to Kavya’s diary.
“Imagine ferrying Shakti on a thin bamboo bridge with the gushing Brahmaputra underneath, or climbing to the Ziro Valley in Arunachal; from narrow gullies of Murshidabad to the hilly terrain of Dooars it has been a new life literally every day,” says Kavya.
She feels that even though a lot of millenials are travelling more than ever, rural India still seems significantly inaccessible to them. Moreover, Indian villages are often considered unsafe and unhygienic. Kavya aims to break that myth and make rural India immensely accessible to one and all. She plans to compile a resource guide soon, which people can use to find and locate eminent spots and landscapes in the Indian countryside.
Till then, you can always catch up with her on her Instagram to learn more about travelling in rural India.
Currently, she is travelling to the interiors of Odisha in Kalahandi, Koraput and Gopalpur, after which she plans to cover Chhattisgarh.
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