World Tourism Day in India 2023

On World Tourism Day in India 2023, we Indians must be proud , rightly so, of our heritage sites, architectural and cultural splendours, geographical natural wonders and our tourism departments blunders.

 

We have not tapped even 10% of our potential. While we wax eloquent on bran drain, we hardly ever bother to notice, much less quantify, the tourism revenue drain in India. 

 

Modern day tourism requires proper infrastructure with a complete ecosystem involving a whole gamut of tourists’ attraction and promotion factors. Comfort in new environs to enjoy both the journey, visit and stay that can trigger nostalgic feelings at a later day and there must be somethings to revisit those nostalgic moments, at least some basic memorabilia like T-shirts, photo cards, fridge magnets, key chains, booklets etc. None of these things are there in most places. 

 

Even our much-venerated pilgrimage centres the journey are not adventurous or anything to do with ascetic arduous peregrinations but pure danger and potential risk, they escalate when a VIP visits. There is neither discipline nor crowd management anywhere. Cleanliness is totally neglected in most places.

 

If people, try to escape all these dangers and try to go abroad our system kills the very instinct for travel and tourism through a 17^th century stupid NOC rules in almost all organisations.

 

When you visit a place, you grasp life in its complete form as it is in that place. While doing so, you feel a new joy, experience life differently and learn to appreciate the whole  environment  i.e., all aspects of that place its language, culture, food, dress, traditions etc with total intensity and intense totality. Of course, certain preferences, embedded as prejudices, may not allow one to accept every type of food, appreciate every culture of the place or accept all types of dress codes, understand every language, yet one is struck by something new, something different and most importantly, in most places people are nice to tourists.

 

"What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do — especially in other people's minds.  When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then.  People don't have your past to hold against you.  No yesterdays on the road."-William L H Moon

Symbolically too, when our mind travels without carrying the burden of the past  it is a very enjoyable journey .

 

Travelogues takes us not only to new places but introduce us to hitherto unknown and unseen newer perspectives to perceive life. 

 

Many great works are chronicles of observed activities or absurdities , the psychological impacts it had on the thinker or writer, their own  perceived and  concerned socio- cultural implications of those activities. 

 

In some cases, they also used ideological extrapolation  to interpret events. 

 

The author. who unfortunately, missed Nobel prize James Joyce's 1000 plus pages book Ulysses is chronicle of a day.  Some weave a wonderful study of psychology.  

 

Even when some great authors, thinkers and seekers write travelogues they convey a lot of great in-depth insight , architectural  study and philosophical insights. In Paul Brunton's work his spiritual seeking, Socio-psychological aspects in Aldous Huxley's works and socio- cultural aspects and romance in Lawrence Durrell's works etc.