Sagar Srivastava, 33, has been fascinated by maps ever since he was a young boy. His father, who is in the merchant navy, would regularly bring home huge navigational chartbooks and tell him about countries around the world. “I started sketching maps on anything I could get my hands on,” the aspiring filmmaker recalls.
Today, he works as a researcher at a major Mumbai production company, which gives him the opportunity to flex his passion for history. Cartography, however, is a hobby Srivastava has had to nurture in isolation.
In an era where your phone’s GPS can guide you to any destination, and even map out alternate routes to account for real-time traffic, many of us have forgotten the thrill of adventure that physical maps can inspire. Still, Srivastava was able to tap into a few niche cartography communities online: during the lockdown, he began to post his sketches on subReddits such as Geography, World History, and Cartography, where he got a largely positive response. He regularly posts on his blog, Maps by Sagar, which has 1.7K followers at the time of writing. And he even managed to make some money selling his large scale sketches.
