ABOUT

Kintsugi bowls dusted in gold. Photography by Marco Maltalti.

According to legend, the 15th-century Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite tea bowl one day and sent it out for repair. It came back held together with metal clasps that disfigured the item and failed to make it watertight. He asked his Japanese artisans to mend the bowl, and the art of kintsugi was born. 

The word kintsugi derives from the Japanese “kin” and “tsugi,” which translates to “golden joint.” The detailed process first involves gathering the broken pieces of an item and gluing it back together. Once dried and sanded, the cracks are accentuated with multiple coats of lacquer and dusted with a metallic powder that is traditionally gold. The Japanese believe that the golden cracks in these pieces make the items even more beautiful and valuable. More than just a craft technique, kintsugi follows the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, a belief centered on accepting and embracing the imperfections of life.

This philosophy is at the heart of Gold-Dusted Living.

Gold-Dusted Living is a storytelling platform rooted in cultural memory, personal reclamation, and collective truth. It traces the golden seams between travel, history, culture, justice, and wellness for those who live with deep questions and an open heart. This space honors the connection between personal truth and shared reality, whether that be through writing, digital offerings, or the act of bearing witness — both in the places we’ve been and those we’ve only come to know through our screens and the voices of those living there.

This site is for those who have been shattered by systems, by silence, by the long ache of erasure. For those who choose, again and again, to gather their pieces with intention. It is a space for women and truth-seekers, especially those of the global majority, who are done following wellness scripts that erase their lived experience. Who no longer fit inside the boxes that once kept them small. Who carry the truth that wholeness is born from the ruins, not in spite of them. Who understand that healing is not about perfection, but about presence. Here, we are not broken. We are rebuilt. Repair is ritual. This process does not diminish us; it reclaims our shape, restores our rhythm, and dares to call us beautiful because of the cracks.

And still, let us tell the truth: healing cannot happen without reckoning. You cannot "love and light" your way through structural violence. You cannot cleanse the body of injustice by drinking green juice. You cannot meditate and feel a sense of safety without first addressing the survival patterns your body still carries. You cannot find liberation in yoga spaces that stole a sacred practice, erased its origins, and repackaged it through whiteness, classism, and curated aesthetics. And you absolutely cannot build with those who weaponize feminism as an arm of empire, refusing to be intersectional, inclusive, or accountable.

Here, we confronts the way supremacist capitalism strips wisdom traditions of their context, monetizes them for the privileged, and silences those who remember their roots. It names the harm across industries and borders — in nations built on stolen land, funded by stolen labor, and enriched by stolen culture. It exposes the performance of solidarity that hides complicity, the branding of care without its practice, and the policies that erode our most basic needs while manufacturing crises for profit.

Because if you're paying attention, you know this: you cannot be truly well in a world unraveling by design. Not when housing is unaffordable, public services are gutted, and survival is criminalized. Not when war is marketed as democracy, and rest is shamed unless it’s sold back to us as luxury. These realities shape our nervous systems, our choices, and our capacity to merely exist.

We do not look away. We name what tries to break us. We honor the wisdom of our ancestors and the sacred in our bones. We explore not just how we heal, but how we remember, reclaim, and resist. Here, travel is a form of truth-seeking. Culture is honored in its true context. Justice is woven into every offering. And healing is never detached from history.

This is where story, spirit, and sovereignty meet — unfiltered, uncolonized, and unapologetic.

Welcome to Gold-Dusted Living. Your collective concierge.

Rakhee Bhatt
Founder + Writer

Over the past 20+ years, I’ve worked professionally as a writer and editor for global companies as well as start-ups. But I’ve been drawn to storytelling for as long as I can remember. From a young age, I knew I wanted to be a writer and an explorer — someone who listened deeply, traveled widely, and stayed open to the truth of things. Curiosity has always been my compass, and it’s the quality I cherish most in myself. It’s what led me to the page, to far-off places, and ultimately to myself.

One of the greatest influences on my path — still and forevermore — is Anthony Bourdain. His storytelling was not only poetic, but humble, empathetic, and disarmingly honest. He showed me that travel could be a lens, not a checklist. He taught me to make my own way. To welcome the unexpected. To risk having the bad experiences in search of the magical ones. To accept random acts of hospitality. Who Tony was, in every way, shaped how I move through the world — not with a rigid itinerary, but with openness, reverence, and the willingness to be truly present.

During a period of health challenges — a stretch that began before the pandemic, deepened during it, and lingered after — I put the plans in motion to realize a long-held dream. In the summer of 2022, I let go of everything familiar: my city, my apartment, my routines, and many beloved books. I embarked on a two-year journey as a digital nomad, immersing myself in the lived realities of people and places across the globe.

Those two years changed everything. What began as quiet movement transformed into a holistic reawakening. This nomadic experience didn’t just introduce me to truths; it stripped away the falsities. It clarified my voice, refined my purpose, and brought me back to the kind of storytelling I’ve always been drawn to — the kind that empowers, remembers, and restores. The kind that Anthony Bourdain modeled so well.

But getting to that point — to that ultimate dream I spent years working toward — was no easy feat. Beyond the pervasive and everyday violence of existing as a first-generation Indian American woman in this world, I had to build my exit strategy inside jobs that did everything they could to dehumanize me. While they clung to petty power and shirked their responsibilities under the guise of leadership, I was unassumingly planting the seeds of another life — one rooted not in their validation, but in my vision. Every targeted attack, every racist and misogynistic insult, every deliberate sabotage, every stolen piece of work, every wage not paid, and every truth bullied into silence became raw material for my alchemy. I turned their cruelty into clarity. Their control into fuel. I absorbed as much knowledge, insight, and experience as I could until the very last day at every job. Even as they tried to keep me small, I was learning, improving, dreaming, saving, planning — building a life they could never touch. And all along the way, I also saw who not to become and where not to settle. That’s what they never saw coming. I didn’t just survive them and their grotesque systems. I transmuted it all.

I didn’t travel to escape the life I had. I traveled to remember and reclaim what had been buried — and to live fully. I saw places more breathtaking than any photograph could capture. I went off the beaten path and let the unexpected shape me. I shared meals that felt sacred. I met people whose presence felt like home. I experienced beauty in the daily rituals of others, in the deep love that held their communities together, in the generosity of strangers, and in cultures that honored rhythm, lineage, and spirit in ways I had never felt or known. I had adventures that made me stop mid-step, mid-breath, just to take it all in. Moments where I looked around and thought, I really did this. I made it here. I’m inside my wildest dreams.

And alongside the wonder, there was a reckoning I felt to my core. I learned stories that had been callously scrubbed from the curriculum I was raised on — truths I was never meant to know, but witnessed firsthand in the very places they happened, where grief and resilience speak louder than denial ever could. It was during this journey that I finally stopped internalizing the colonial violence that had been forced upon me. I peeled away the propaganda that taught me to dismiss my intuition, swallow pain, and downplay the daily injustices I witnessed and experienced. I saw the racism, misogyny, and classism not as personal wounds or the failings of the nation I was born into, but as global patterns upheld by systems built to exhaust, erase, and exploit. I stopped wondering if I in fact was too sensitive, as many wanted me to believe, and began dissecting the lifetime of layered abuses I had been conditioned to carry. I began naming what I had endured. And I let the grief and rage rise — fully and unapologetically — to the surface.

I created Gold-Dusted Living in the spirit of kintsugi as a way of life, where fracture becomes form. This space was born from the reclamation. From the rising. Like so many women of the global majority, I was never meant to survive this world whole or even in parts. But I did.

The truest beauty of this life — the joy and love that kept me going — came through the people, places, and moments that made me feel at seen and reminded me that I could be that for myself. So when they weren’t there, I stayed with me. I experienced happiness when everything around me tried to deny it. I gave myself the softness I was told was weakness. I made meaning out of pain, and beauty out of brokenness. All of this goodness, from others and myself, was my gold dusting. It was what held me, healed me, and what made this life worth living.

Here’s to the ones who are pure magic. This space exists because of you.

Want to connect? Email me at rakhee@golddustedliving.com