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Experience My India

The Journal

The Journal is first-hand, recurring-access storytelling on spiritual and cultural India, written by the guides who are actually there — the continuous version of the one-off feature the media publishes and the 'ultimate guide' the OTAs never attempt.

11 articles by our India specialists · RSS feed

Latest

Hidden gems in Kerala

2 min read

Beyond Alleppey and Munnar: Vagamon, Gavi and other quieter corners of Kerala worth the extra effort to reach.

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More from the journal

2 min read

Kerala tourist places for a one-day trip

Where to go in Kerala if you only have one day: Alleppey backwaters, Kochi's old town, Munnar's tea hills and more, with what's realistic in a day.

1 min read

The famous foods of Rajasthan

The dishes that define Rajasthani food: dal baati churma, laal maas, gatte ki sabzi, and where to eat them well on a Rajasthan trip.

1 min read

Mount Abu, Rajasthan: what to see

Rajasthan's only hill station: Nakki Lake, Dilwara Jain temples, Guru Shikhar and Sunset Point — what to see in Mount Abu and how much time to give it.

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Frequently asked questions

Who writes the journal?

Founder Gurudutt Kaushal carries the lead byline today. Other local guides will carry bylines once their profiles and consent are real — we don't invent authors.

Does the journal ever publish 'best of' lists?

No — that belongs to our destination hubs, not the journal, so the two never compete for the same search.

How often is new content published?

We haven't committed to a fixed publishing schedule — we publish when a story is properly researched and checked, not to a filler schedule.

Are festival dates on this journal exact?

Lunar festival dates change every year; we say so rather than print a fixed date, and point you to a current panchang or official source for the exact date.

How are distances checked?

We use only well-known road and rail figures, and mark anything we're not fully certain of as rather than invent a number.

About The Journal

What the journal covers

  • First-hand narrativewhat it is actually like to be there
  • Photo essays and portraits of festival, ritual and people
  • Culture, festivals, ritual and history deep-dives
  • News-pegged coverage of a festival happening now
  • A guide's own story, and what happens behind it

What the journal will never write

  • 'Best destinations for…'that belongs to a destination hub
  • 'Best time to visit', trip cost, itinerarieshub spokes cover those
  • '{destination} packages'that's what our tour pages are for
  • 'Things to do in {city}'the destination guides cover that

Four themes

  • Pilgrimage storiesthe walk, the queue, the river at four in the morning; what a pilgrimage asks of the people who make it.
  • Festivals & ritualHoli in the Braj villages, Dev Deepawali on the Varanasi ghats, the river fairs, reported in the week they happen.
  • Culture & everyday lifethe trades, the music, the food and the ordinary morning on the steps.
  • Guides' own storiesthe people who show you all of this have their own version of it.

Series in progress

  • Braj through the yearVrindavan, Mathura and Barsana across a full festival calendar, told by people who are in Braj every season.
  • The rivers of pilgrimagethe Ganga from Rishikesh to Varanasi, and the Yamuna through Braj.
  • The people of the ghatsportraits from the Varanasi waterfront, photographed and named with consent, never as spectacle.

How a story gets published

  • Every claim is checkedevery ritual, date, place and historical claim is verified against a real source or first-hand knowledge before publish.
  • Reviewed by someone from the traditiona guide from the community reads anything touching faith or ritual, for accuracy and for respect.
  • Consent, and never spectaclea photo essay about real people needs their consent for both the image and the story.
  • Corrections in daylightwhen something is wrong we publish a dated correction rather than quietly editing it.

How stories age

  • Evergreenupdated in place and kept indexed; the date moves only when the story really changes.
  • Annualrefreshed each year into the current edition at the same address, so one story keeps its authority.
  • News-peggedtime-stamped and left standing as a record afterwards, out of the featured slot but never back-dated.
  • Retiredredirected into the stronger story rather than left to decay the topic around it.

Who writes it

Gurudutt Kaushal, founder of Experience My India and a Vrindavan guide before that, carries the lead byline. Experience My India works with a panel of 500+ local, third-generation guides, and they are the authors this vertical is built around — but a byline is a person, and no guide-author appears here until their name, their bio and their own profile are real. The same honesty gate our guides vertical uses applies to a credential on a byline: no 'licensed' claim without a verified licence number.

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