I don’t like to travel. But I do like to arrive. I’d ideally skip the tedium of transit and be teleported into new worlds.

Travel, though, has long been a part of my family’s history. My great grandmother Banoo, who lived through three centuries, travelled from Calcutta to Bombay in a bullock cart. My South Indian grandfather was a navigator during the war and met my Austrian grandmother in London. My mother was a flight attendant during a more glamorous time for travel (she wore a full bejewelled Ghagra) and lived around the globe when Air India had placements in cities like Moscow or Perth. When having two children eventually grounded my mother, we still had the huge privilege of free flights.

Now, I mostly enjoy the delusion of the ‘travel sketcher’: often seated in dappled shade, painting watercolours. My sketch book, colour pencils and paint, are all painstakingly packed and lugged around because of this dream. Happily, at Black Tomato, I get to occupy this role much of the time – taking the world as inspiration for all things branding and design. So, while I may dislike transit, and a 3-month journey in bullock cart seems like madness, the love of the destination always remains.