How I found the alphabet hidden in India

A while ago I came across NASA's Your Name in Landsat. You type your name and it spells it out using satellite photos of islands, lakes and rivers from around the world. I played with it far longer than I'd like to admit.

Then a question got stuck in my head: could you do the same thing using only India? The country has the Himalayas, the Thar desert, the Ganga plains, the Sundarbans, the Western Ghats and more than 7,000 km of coastline. Surely the whole alphabet was in there somewhere.

Searching by hand

I didn't use AI or any automatic shape detection. I opened Google Earth, picked a state, and started scrolling. When something caught my eye — a river doubling back on itself, a lake with a sharp corner, a canal junction — I zoomed in, framed it, and took a screenshot. Then I noted down where it was.

Some letters were easy. Rivers on flat ground meander constantly, so S, C, U and O turned up again and again. Others were much harder. Letters with sharp angles and straight lines, like K and Z, almost never happen in nature, so I'm still hunting for them.

Natural and man-made

As the collection grew, I noticed two very different kinds of letters. Natural ones were shaped by water, wind and rock over thousands of years — river bends, oxbow lakes, deltas, dunes. Man-made ones were built by people — dams, canals, roads, runways, salt pans and farm plots.

What I learned

Looking for letters made me look at India differently. I started noticing how rivers leave behind scars of their old paths, how canal networks turn Punjab into a grid, how the coastline of Gujarat is lined with geometric salt pans. Every frame on this site is a real place with a real story, and I'm slowly writing those stories up on each place's page.

About the images

All frames are screenshots from Google Earth, used for this non-commercial project with the original attribution kept (Imagery © Google Earth). This project isn't affiliated with NASA or Google. If you own a frame and want it removed, or you've spotted a letter I'm missing, I'd love to hear from you.