Holidays, Then and Now

I remember my boss getting very pissed that her daughter expected her holidays to be in London, New York or Dubai. But can you really blame the kid, I remember thinking back then. If that’s what she sees her friends at school and in the neighborhood do, then that’s what she’d want to do.

I was also smug that such a thing wouldn’t happen to me since I didn’t make (anywhere near) as much money as my boss did. Sadly, my assumption is proving to be wrong, bit by bit. While my boss obviously lives in a far better house than mine, she doesn’t send her daughter to some fancy international school. Rather, her kid was going to an academics-is-the-most-important-thing kind of school, which means most kids come from middle/upper-middle class families. And yet, her kid expected foreign holidays. I should have seen it coming…

My daughter started expecting holidays around when she was 4. For the last few years (and touchwood, even now), a holiday is good for her as long as we go to any place outside Bangalore. Mysore, Goa, Ooty, Pondicherry are all acceptable. What’s changed now is that she expects a holiday getaway at every school vacation, not just during the long summer holidays. The reason? Peer pressure! Even more scary, while she still doesn’t get the bragging rights that come with a foreign holiday, she’s stumbling upon it anyway. How? Thanks to her friends who talk about doing exotic things like touching dolphins… in Dubai.

How times have changed. As Santosh Desai said:

“Every year, one headed to one’s hometown, after having reserved the train months in advance. Nothing much happened in one’s home town; indeed most home towns were designed to be that way, but it was still a wonderful time spent in the bosom of a bewilderingly large family.”

The other types of holidays we grew up with were “pilgrimages” and “package tours, with an impossibly large number of destinations being crammed together to deliver a feeling of value for money”.

But today’s holidays are different:

“Vacation snaps (via social media)… give others a glimpse of the best parts of our life, spent lolling about in the beaches of Bali or the sidewalks of Rome… Competitive holidaying is a bruising contact sport, and nothing makes us happier than making other people miserable about our happiness.”

Of course, I’m sure my daughter won’t buy any such argument about the futility of such competition and one-upmanship. Instead, she’ll almost certainly respond with this line that Calvin once asked his dad:

“Is that really what they believe on the planet you're from?”