Suniye ji, your fun isn't fun for everyone

I am amazed. Genuinely, wide-eyed, chin-in-hand amazed. At the confidence of the Indian travellers.

My grandparents' generation had Kundu Special, a packaged tour company. You went to the beach at Puri on Odisha's coast. You ate fish. You came back. You told everyone about the fish for approximately the next year or two.

My parents' generation graduated to Cosmos Tours. Europe in 9 days, 12 countries, one raincoat, and a guide called Hans. They came home with fridge magnets and a complaint about early morning wake-ups, and the botheration of not having Indian meals for many days at a stretch.


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But my generation has produced something the world was not consulted about. Apparently, there is no earthly joy known to mystics, or folks who have finally paid off their home loan, like the joy of a tour group breaking into full-throated garba in the middle of a European airport. A Danish family watching in the exact posture people adopt when they see a snake trick too up close and personal.

India's economic confidence, multiple destination wedding trips, and group tours have given us something else altogether: the power to be ourselves--without any consideration to anyone else.

Not all my observations are based on online incidents, mind you. I have done fieldwork. 25 years ago, outside the Colosseum, I chatted up a group of 60-plus Indians and watched them find in each other a comfort that Rome, for all its ruins, could not offer. The Romans had 2,000 years. Sarla Aunty had 4 days, and a knee issue. In fact, everyone in the group had knee and foot issues. So they walked slower, in a guided tour, comforting each other and tasting the occasional gelato. I understood this.

A group of Bengali retirees in Switzerland once radiated a similar contentment, the specific glow of people who have located, against all odds, a functioning thermos of cha at the base of the Jungfrau.

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But I drew the line at Disneyland. A whole travelling column of my countrypeople, sprawled across a green patch outside Space Mountain, plastic dabbas open to the sun, chowli in one hand, paratha in the other, achaar radiating outward in a soft yellow diplomatic incident. Volumes rising, as they do, in direct proportion to the joy of a shared meal.

Look, I sympathise. I do. Disneyland pricing is not a menu, it's a hostage note. A hot dog costs what my first bicycle did. If Mickey himself came out with a QR code I would not faint. But loud volumes, spilt packs, and a bin overflowing with the ghost of aloo. This is not India's finest export.

Why do we assume our fun is everybody's fun? Why is there, deep in the national character, an unshakable conviction that the Swiss lady at the next table is waiting, hopefully, for someone to hand her a stick and start the beat? That Daffy Duck wants to try a bite of idli?

The incongruity of a calm, cold Zurich platform interrupted by a spontaneous circle of dance is not a statement. It is not culture. It is, plainly and unequivocally, inconsiderate.

We are a people of extraordinary warmth. We are also, a people who have never met a public space we did not immediately treat as an extension of our living room.

Someone will read this and diagnose me from a distance. Brown sahib. Colonised mind. Ashamed of my own culture. Too eager to fold my napkin the way the Europeans do.

There is nothing wrong with fun. There's nothing wrong with song and dance or desi food. I come from a people who sing on trains, and cry at weddings, and eat with our hands, and I would not trade a minute of it. Joy is not the problem.

Intrusion is. Hijacking a shared public space and turning it into your own private baraat is not heritage. It's simply not caring that other people exist in the frame.

I write this, of course, from my own drawing room. Volume moderate. Thepla nowhere in sight, but thoughts of ordering some.