Opinion
Manu Joseph: The spectacle of the West is as interesting as it ever was
Summary
- Even rebellious hippies in the West follows most civic rules. People driving in road lanes can look like a circus to an Indian tourist.
Most of my life, I didn’t need tourism. The first time I went on a vacation was when I was 27, and it was just about 20km across the bay from Mumbai, where I lived. But, finally, I was on this famous thing called a vacation. I am not including some beautiful places I visited on work, alone.
The vacation was highly enjoyable, probably because of my company, but I gave primary credit to the concept of leisure travel, and I thought I must travel more and further, and for no better reason than to be elsewhere. But I wouldn’t go on such a vacation for another two years. The first time I took a flight for a vacation was when I was 32. And I am not that old at all.
Since then, I have been on numerous trips. Once, I saw people kayaking and thought it looked fun. I found a kayak, and realized that its seeming fun is entirely a triumph of imagination. It didn’t match the actual experience, like many things in life. Every time I see people having fun, I recall that kayak.
I did enjoy most vacations somewhat, but I never fully understood them. I didn’t consider them “a break" because I don’t understand the concept. A real break, to me, means a break from myself, but I’m always there on my vacations. Also, the idea of going to a beautiful place for a few days only to return to an ugly Indian city seemed pointless. And I never took seriously the idea of going somewhere to breathe fresh air. What’s the point? You always return home.
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I have now been to all the continents, including Antarctica (though that was on work). And I am yet to fully see the point of tourism. I do enjoy it, but I can see why ancient people never did it. It is particularly pointless if you are a happy person, so your head is a resort anyway and you do not need to flee your life. But I do enjoy taking a break from India.
Only that motive makes sense to me, even though, these days, no matter where you go, you cannot be free of Indians. I’m in London right now and it is filled with Indian tourists.
I like visiting the West because I enjoy the spectacle of it. Its people think they are Bohemian, but they are so orderly. Even a rebellious hippie follows most civic rules. Watching the West being orderly is like a circus to me.
You just stand on a narrow lane and cars stop to let you pass. That leads to some problems because I tend to just stand on the kerb, with nowhere to go, and this makes cars wait even as I wonder whether I should cross. This really infuriates truck drivers and they honk at me.
Anywhere in the West, I can spend hours just watching cars go in their lanes, especially on bends. They never leave their lane, as though they are orbiting a sacred moral, forever in the gravitational pull of an invisible cultural black hole. I wonder at what per capita income level a society begins to drive in road lanes. Will it ever happen in India, or is it too late?
Over the past 20 years since I first visited the West, I’ve been told that its nations suffer from economic gloom. But I have always found the West filled with street joy. There is laughter and beauty, and if there is no hope, it does not show. As an Indian, I have a very different threshold for what despair means.
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London is often described as multicultural, which is not entirely true. Its visible unchanging soul is primarily British and Western. The West may appear to absorb some alien ways, but its fundamental quality is that it does not adapt to another culture.
If it transforms at all, it is because everything transforms over time. The West does not become other people the way we have become other people. We know how the West changed us; but if we ask how we changed the West, we may not find a convincing answer.
The strongest Indian resistance to Western culture is through food. When Indians flock to so-called Indian restaurants abroad, they often have a grimace as they eat because they are usually consuming lousy Indian food at four times the cost. Prices in the West are another spectacle.
It was an even bigger spectacle when India was cheap and I was poor. Entering London was like walking into hyperinflation. It was darkly entertaining, and still is. As an Indian, I have to absorb both local inflation and the rupee’s further depreciation each time I visit.
An odd thing about people who claim to see the point of tourism is that they don’t seem to enjoy it as much as I do. It is easy to see the suffering of many middle-class Indian tourists. As things are, family vacations are fraught with risk because the family moves from a large space to a squished hotel room.
They have to face each other for long hours without respite. One of the unspoken truths about human beings is that most of them cannot take full exposure to family for more than four hours a day. Particularly miserable are families who travel with infants. Without domestic help, they end up toiling on vacation.
And the only person who suffers less than at home is the baby, who will not remember anything. My unsolicited advice to new parents is that they should not waste money on a foreign holiday unless their child develops memory space.
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Over the past 20 years, the Indian tourist has become somewhat more comfortable dealing with people of the West, especially the swag of the Western underclass. Still, many Indians visiting the West seem suffocated by all the order and quality and need to behave themselves at all times. I get the feeling that Indians visit Indian restaurants partly to scream at Indian waiters, as some kind of cultural relief.
