It begins with a gold-tinged scene of a waterway at dawn. Burnt-out husks of dead trees rise from the water like the Devil’s fingers – and after more than ten seconds, one of them moves! The landscape is alive! Run for your lives! It is in fact a humanoid figure, long-legged and brandishing a spear. There are no signs that it will be aggressive, but one senses that it might become so at any moment.
WHAT THIS MEANS: Welcome to Kerala.
Tag: tourism
The Truth About India
I usually skim over and delete forwarded emails within seconds of receiving them, but when Sean-Paul Kelley’s scathing assessment of India popped up in my inbox, I carefully read and re-read each word with rising irritation and, ultimately, anger. Kelley is an American travel writer whose bio on several sites, including The Huffington Post, states that he has had several very good jobs, he maintains a highly regarded blog called The Agonist and he has travelled in more than 47 countries. While this last fact makes his voice a little more deserving of deliberation, it does not transform his words into gospel, even if the majority of what he writes is true; the accountants’ truth matters little if couched in words that are roundly negative, Westernist and irresponsible.
A brief summary of Kelley’s piece:
India (except Kerala) is polluted, infrastructurally backward, bureaucratically inefficient and riven with corruption. And things aren’t going to get better, because no Indians (except in Kerala) “give a shit”.
Jdanspsa Wyksui 