I'm 13, and I am definitely not an expert on Indian culture.
That is actually one of the reasons I wanted to build Culture Atlas.
When I look something up about India, I can usually find an answer. I can search for a language, a festival, a painting style, a historical place or a food tradition. There are websites, videos, books, archives and articles about almost everything.
But I started noticing that finding a fact and understanding how it connects to everything around it are two different things.
The question that started it
Imagine I start with Maharashtra. I might discover Marathi. From Marathi, I might want to find literature or theatre. A story might lead me to a community. That community might lead me to a tradition. The tradition might belong to a particular place, use a particular language and have people who still practise it today.
I wanted to be able to keep following those connections.
Instead, most of the time I would have to open another search, then another website, then another tab. Each answer was useful, but I was rebuilding the path myself every time. The information existed. The path between the information didn't.
That became the basic idea for Culture Atlas: not simply another place to collect information, but a way to make the relationships between things visible enough that curiosity can keep moving.
I thought I was building a map
My first idea was much simpler: make an interactive map of India and let people click on a state to discover its culture.
I still think the map is important. Geography is a natural way to begin exploring India, especially when you do not yet know what you want to search for. A map gives you somewhere to start.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that culture does not behave like a political map.
Languages cross state borders. Communities move. Food travels. Music changes when people meet other people. Historical regions existed before our current state boundaries. A tradition might be connected to several places rather than one neat point on a map.
That changed the question. Instead of asking, “How do I put culture on a map?” I started asking, “How can the map help someone enter a much larger network of culture?”
So I started thinking that the map should be the entrance, not the whole product.
The thing behind the map
What I am trying to build behind it is a connected system.
A place can connect to a language. A language can connect to a community. A community can connect to a tradition. A tradition can connect to a person, a story, a photograph, a recording or a source. Then any of those can lead somewhere else.
I have learned that this kind of structure is often called a knowledge graph. The name sounds technical, but what interests me is very simple: it is closer to the way curiosity actually works.
You rarely learn something interesting and think, “Great. I never want to know anything related to that.” Usually one answer creates another question.
That changed what I thought a “page” was
At first, I imagined Culture Atlas as a collection of pages: one page for a place, another for a language, another for a tradition. I still need readable pages, but now I think the page is only what the visitor sees. Underneath it, the important part is the record and its relationships.
That distinction matters because a page can become a dead end. A connected record can become a doorway.
For me, that has been one of the first big lessons of building this project: sometimes the visible design is not the hardest part. The harder part is deciding what the information actually is and how it should behave.
I also don't want the Atlas to pretend it knows everything
If I build a record about a tradition, where did the information come from? Was it a book? A museum? A government archive? An academic paper? A person from the community? An interview with a practitioner?
I don't think those sources should disappear once the page is written.
I want Culture Atlas to eventually make it possible to see where information came from and, where possible, hear from people who actually carry the tradition themselves. That is especially important because Culture Atlas grows out of Anhaya's living-culture work and is connected to Spin A Yarn India, where stories and lived memory matter.
That also means the Atlas will have gaps. I think it is better to show that we have not documented something properly yet than to make the project look complete when it isn't.
What I am building first
The full idea can become enormous very quickly, so I am trying not to build everything at once. For the first version, I want to find out whether five basic things work:
Can a map make people curious enough to start exploring?
Can places, languages, communities, traditions and stories work as connected records?
Can someone move naturally from one record to another?
Can sources stay visible instead of disappearing behind the final text?
Can new material be added without rebuilding the website every time?
If those things work, I have something worth extending. If they do not, it is better to discover that while the project is still small.
Why I'm writing while I build
I could wait until Culture Atlas is finished and then write a neat story about how it was made. But I think that would leave out the most interesting part.
Right now I am still figuring things out. Some ideas will probably turn out to be bad. Some things that sound simple will be difficult to build. I will discover things about Indian culture that change the way the database needs to work. I will probably redesign parts of it more than once.
So this journal is going to include those parts too: what I am researching, what I am trying to build, what goes wrong, what I change and what I learn from it.
A pattern I started noticing
In maths, one value becomes more useful when I can see the pattern around it. I am beginning to think about cultural information in a similar way: a fact matters, but the relationships around it can reveal a larger structure. In English, I also have to think about the reader—what do they know first, and what question should come next? In Individuals & Societies, place changes the meaning of what I am studying. Those three ideas—pattern, audience and place—are already shaping Culture Atlas.
From facts to relationships
The biggest change so far is that I no longer think I am building a website about Indian culture. I think I am trying to build a way of exploring relationships inside Indian culture.
That is a harder problem, but it is also a much more interesting one.
What I'm figuring out next
The next question is whether the problem is really missing information or missing connections. That matters because the answer changes what Culture Atlas needs to become.
I don't know exactly what Culture Atlas will look like when it is finished. But I know the question I want it to keep answering:
I found something interesting. Where can I go next?
Follow the build
Culture Atlas is part of Anhaya Educational Foundation's living-culture work and is connected to Spin A Yarn India. This journal follows the project from idea to working product.