Travels to South East Asia

Anurag Minus Verma. Yes, that’s his name on Internet posts and his books! He’s a Dalit, and it was his joke-cum-commentary-on-society to “drop” the surname, a dead giveaway on caste (Kind of like how Tamilians dropped surnames long ago).

 

I could relate 100% with his post on travelling to South East Asia.

“A few years ago, when you said “Thailand” to an Indian man, his face would undergo a minor muscular transformation. A smirk would appear on face that can be interpreted as half-guilt for the sins he’s committed or half-anticipation for the sins he desires to commit.”

In recent years though, things changed.

“Flights got cheaper. Visas on arrival made it incredibly easy for Indians to travel.”

 

Suddenly, Indians were travelling all around. And they began to realize their preconceived notions of South East Asia were all wrong, they landed “expecting moral chaos but finding civic order”.

“The driver doesn’t honk. He doesn’t curse. He simply drives in his lane.”

Then the humble footpath blows you away.

“The next shock is the footpath. It is wide, continuous and, as the name suggests, it’s a path meant for foot. Not a service lane for two-wheelers, not a parking strip for scooters, not a bazaar extension. You walk without scanning for open drains or missing manhole covers that wait like traps.”

Even the lower-end hotels, while not huge, are clean.

“You pull off the curtains and look from the window of the hotel that traffic is moving so smoothly as if everyone is just back from the meditation center.”

It reminded me of my then 11 yo daughter commenting on Singapore, “Appa, even when they are doing road repair at peak traffic hours, the flow is so smooth, the traffic switches lanes and gives way without honking”.

 

All this eventually hits you very hard.

“You begin to feel a strange shock that also has an air of melancholy. We assumed everyone in the neighbourhood was rotting at the same pace. Our decay felt like regional solidarity, a shared belonging among the not-quite-first-world nations. It felt fine. It felt relaxing. Until we realised they’d been progressing while we were perfecting the art of the great Indian delusion.”

Not just Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. (I’ll add Malaysia but I’ll skip Singapore since it makes first world countries look pedestrian by comparison). Even Sri Lanka “is so clean with smooth roads and traffic discipline”.

“We finally saw that vikas, the great promise, was happening elsewhere.”

 

This spike in foreign travel to South East Asia coincides with a sharp drop in travel to Goa.

“Why Goa, when you can get far better value for money in South East Asia? That same thought is now pushing thousands of Indians abroad, skipping domestic destinations altogether.”

 

You don’t need to hear all this from your friends or relatives. Endless vloggers on the Net, on YouTube, on Instagram are showing this to us all the time.

“Their travel content has become a mirror that reflects how much disorder we have learned to call culture.”

 

Cleanliness. It has completed bypassed Indian civic sense. As a Dalit, he has a thought-provoking view on why that may be the case.

“Civic sense, like most virtues here, has always been arranged along caste lines. When you grow up believing that someone else exists to clean after you, you slowly lose the idea of being an equal citizen. You become an upper node in a hierarchy, not a unit in a society. You throw, they pick. You pollute, they purify. The chain of filth remains sacred.”

 

He ends tongue-in-cheek upon the return back home.

“Perhaps it’s true that when the flight lands back home, Indians won’t jump with joy, they’ll jump because the first pothole of the motherland waits right outside the airport, ready to welcome them back.”

Touché.