Why India is hard to sell and harder to forget
Something worth saying plainly, since this room is for the longer thoughts.
Most countries can be sold on a promise of ease. Here is a beach, here is a wine region, here is a city with good museums and clean trams. The pitch is: it will be lovely and nothing will be difficult.
India cannot be sold that way honestly, and the attempts to do it are why so many first trips disappoint. The brochure flattens it into palaces and tigers and a spa, and then the actual country arrives — crowded, loud, hot, generous, startling, contradictory, and absolutely indifferent to the schedule.
What good travel here does is not remove that. It would be a poor trade if it did. It gives you a shape to meet it inside: somewhere cool to retreat to at two in the afternoon, somebody who can explain what you just watched, a car that is yours, and a day with slack in it so that the unplanned thing has room to happen.
That is the whole craft, really. Not smoothing India out. Building the conditions in which it can be properly met.
Which is also why nobody comes back from a good trip here describing the hotels. They describe a conversation, or a morning, or something they did not understand at the time.
Sign in to reply.
