Gary Mehigan has spent six festivals finding out what a country eats when it celebrates. For National Geographic's India's Mega Festivals, he followed Onam to Kerala, Eid to Hyderabad, Durga Puja to Kolkata, and Holi to Vrindavan, the town where the festival is said to have begun. He queued at dawn for kachori and aloo jhol passed hand to hand from a single stall, stood in streets turned the colour of every flower in the market, and watched a town empty its temples into its lanes.

This journey opens in Delhi rather than Mumbai, because Holi falls on a fixed date and Gary built the route around the festival, not around the usual arrival city. Old Delhi's spice lanes and a Sikh temple's langar kitchen come first, then Vrindavan for the festival itself, then Agra, Jaipur, and Mumbai, the city Gary knows best in India, as the final stop before the flight home.