Dear traveller,
We Indians have grown a skin so thick over time that even the most disparaging remarks about our complex lifestyle, our grimy Hobbit holes, abominable personal hygiene and lack of population control fail to rile us. But that's no excuse for us to disappoint guests who come looking for the 'Complete Indian Experience' and feel cheated if our infrastructure contradicts paragraph 23 or page 345 of your 'What to Expect When You Are In India' travel guide.
No matter. We live and die by our 'atithi devo bhava' motto, which roughly translates to 'we are glad you are spending your foreign currency at our great and ancient country instead of filthy Malaysia and we can promise any experience you want.'
It explains the mixed feelings with which I read this piece in the Telegraph this morning and felt compelled to respond. Stephen McClarence and his wife were in India and decided to spend a day Delhi Metro hopping. What ensued is a travel piece that is perhaps well-meaning but hilariously outdated and amazingly condescending.
"Clean, fast and efficient, it (the Delhi Metro) cuts congestion in this traffic-choked city, in which horn-honking cars, lorries, buses and motor rickshaws jostle for space on roads sometimes built for bullock carts," McClarence writes.
Technically McClarence isn't wrong. That's the Ministry of Urban Development's agenda for the next Five Year Plan - to build the largest and busiest bullock cart road network that will be the pride of Asia. And God knows it might be grim reality one day going by the state of our roads.
I almost feel warm affection for McClarence for how he describes the Delhi Metro stations. He writes: "The platforms are wide and litter-free. No cows wander nonchalantly along them, as they do at Indian railway stations."
Well, what can I say? It's never easy to arrange for cows at such short notice and hauling them up through the metal detecting gates and tight security is a bloody nuisance.
"At the bottom of the escalators, we are briskly frisked by armed guards and our bags are scanned. Crowds are surging towards the platforms, but in an orderly way, with organised queues to board some trains: amazing in a country where someone once defined a queue as a scrum 30 people wide and one person deep," he writes.
I invite you to our Annual Sabarimala Stampede Day. It's fun.
The country hick's approach to travelling across India was amusing when we didn't have indigenous aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons or deep-space programmes that cost only a third of its American counterparts. Well, truth be told we have little else.
Yet, Indians are inherently polite (don't go by this article). So while the brown-skinned traveller or one with the unfamiliar last name can trigger a security alarm at the airport elsewhere, in our country all forms and classes of tourists are free to bargain for ethnic ware, choose their travel route and share their experiences - fraught with dangerous generalisations - with the world.
Do we have nagging beggars, unscrupulous travel agents, rapist auto-rickshaw drivers? Of course we do. But we love your wide-eyed appreciation for our progress from cave dwellers to builders of clean and functional Metros.
We owe you a cow.
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