South India is where three different chapters of my life overlap on the same map.

The earliest is a family pilgrimage down to Rameshwaram and Kanyakumari — two of the subcontinent's most symbolically loaded points, one a temple town linked to the Ramayana, the other the literal southern tip of India, where three seas meet. It's the kind of trip that gets planned around a temple calendar rather than a travel one, and it hits differently for it.

Then came the VIT years — college road trips through Tamil Nadu and the neighbouring states that were less about monuments and more about the freedom of just being able to go somewhere on a weekend with friends and no real itinerary. Those trips don't always leave behind postcard photos, but they're the ones that teach you how to actually travel — how to negotiate an auto fare, how to find the good food that isn't in any guidebook.

The most recent addition is a 2025 route through Karnataka's old Chalukya capitals — Badami, Aihole, Pattadakal — a cluster of temple towns that most itineraries skip in favor of Hampi, and that I think deserve equal billing. Rock-cut cave temples at Badami, the "cradle of Indian temple architecture" at Aihole, and Pattadakal's UNESCO-listed complex together tell the story of how South Indian temple design was invented, centuries before it matured into the more famous Dravidian and Hoysala styles further south.

Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Lakshadweep round out the region — the first two carrying their own Deccan history distinct from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, Lakshadweep the outlier: India's only coral-island territory, and about as far from a Chalukya temple as this country gets.