Nearly every image you see of Taj shows makes it look lonely. There is just the majestic monument against a nice blue sky. No other construction of any kind, no people, nothing else. It gives an impression as though you could get there and spend time all by yourself marveling the monument.
The truth is far from it; it is almost always buzzing with thousands of people. Even at 6am in the morning when the doors open, you see a queue of people waiting to be let in. The morning crowd is largely western but Indians arriving later in the day are also in a formidable number. The economic prosperity and newly found riches of the Indian economy are propelling people to get out in large numbers.
We are a country where tourism has kicked off well only in the last few years. Continued economic growth will only make more and more people footloose, freeing up their resources and enabling them to spend on travelling. That’s a good thing indeed, but the question comes, how many tourists can the Taj accommodate? It already feels crowded, and the system may not be able to bear two to three times more people in the future.
The number of people waiting to see the sunrise at Kanyakumari exceeds a few thousands in winter weekends.
The likely result is that numbers may have to be restricted sometime in future. That might mean booking a ticket and waiting for a few years for your turn to see the monument. Or the other thing that could happen – entry prices may be hiked up to unreasonable levels making it difficult for everyone to afford it.
It may be really long way for such a thing to happen at Taj Mahal. But Ranthambhore is feeling the heat for a long time, and entry restrictions have meant booking ahead far into future. Corbett National Park also has entry limits which can cause similar problems in the days to come. There are other national parks like Bandipur and Nagarahole where there are no restrictions yet, but the heavy inflow of tourists is indeed disturbing the animals and a step at restricting the flow may be inevitable.
The problem is not limited to India, the same trends can be seen world over. Machu Picchu, a prized possessions of Peru’s history is crowded with tourists and bookings are already closed for next few years. The trend is likely to continue and may affect more and more places all over the world. A news report talks of the lack of supply for the growing demand in tourism:
Indian call centre employees, Russian engineers, Chinese middle managers and Brazilian salesmen are scouring the web for deals on trips. They want to see Paris from the Eiffel Tower, relax in the Maldives and play blackjack in Las Vegas. According to the UN World Tourism Organisation, international tourist visits are expected to double by 2020, from roughly 800 million in 2008 to 1.6 billion…
…governments and institutions may seek to control demand by imposing heavy surcharges on travel to the most popular places or by requiring costly visas for access to them…
…rationing — and the resulting waiting lists — will become commonplace. Some groups, for example, are already calling for limits on traffic to ecologically sensitive destinations…
The way we are all going out in search of destinations, I can see this becoming more common all over the world.
Don’t worry yet, I am not writing about IPL.
Hockey may be India’s national game, but be it a school ground, public play ground or just a small nondescript lane in a corner of the town, it is cricket that dominates. We are a nation that breaths the game and have made it a part of our identity. Young brats put up make-shift wickets in small lanes and play away the summer holidays. Playgrounds that should ideally serve two teams playing against each other usually buckle under the pressure of population, letting in a dozen cricket pitches emerge, occupied by more than hundred people.
Visuals of cricket was never away from me wherever I travelled in the country. When I struck conversations with strangers and told them where I hail from, my city was identified by cricketers who made it home.
I was sitting uncomfortably in a cramped mini-bus that was taking difficult mountain roads of Garhwal, when the man next to me started a friendly talk. When he asked the usual ice-breaker question – “where are you from?” I told him I am from Bangalore.
“Rahul Dravid,” he responded immediately. He seemed a little excited for a moment, and paused for a few seconds. I gently nodded.
“He is from Bangalore, right?” he said, and continued, “so lot of people play cricket in Bangalore? You have many good players from your city.”
Those were the days when Karnataka contributed considerably to the national cricket team, with names like Javagal Sreenath, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble and a few more. Needless to say, lot of people indeed played cricket in Bangalore.
“Do you also play?” I asked him to keep the conversation moving, “is cricket very popular here too?”
“Yes of course, everyone enjoys cricket,” he said in a tone that sounded slightly sober, “But we can’t play here. You need level ground to play but there is hardly any place large enough to play. But they do play in the lower regions like Dehradun and Haridwar.”
Garhwal is a mountain region where ‘level ground’ is almost like an oxymoron. The mountainous terrain is always sloping, and any level ground if exists is used for agriculture.
But walking the slopes of Auli next day, I was to find out that what Garhwalis lacked in favourable terrain, they made with their love for the game. At 10,000 feet high in the mountain, a bunch of young men had managed find a gentle slope amidst patches of snow, and had started their game early in the day. It was such a place that if the batsmen hit the ball a little hard or sent it to the wrong place, the ball would take a plunge in the valley and roll down a few hundred meters. But that did not seem to deter them and they were happy just to have something as close as it can get to level ground.
If that is the story in mountains, it is obvious that you will bump into people playing cricket everywhere when you are in the plains. The “Rahul Dravid” identity was visible in many other places, especially in the North. I heard the same exclamation in a few small towns of Rajasthan too, where the cricketing icon was larger than the city itself. Other things that Bangalore is known for – like the technology hub, software enterprises or the traffic jams did not seem to stay in the top of their minds.
And then I got pulled into the game at times during my journeys. Travelling with an enthusiastic bunch of volunteers in a tsunami relief mission in TamilNadu, we had jumped when we saw a bunch of kids playing in the fields and joined then for an hour’s play. Only a few months back I had found myself with a bunch of kids in Aihole village who wanted me to join them in a game. I was walking on the road admiring the archaeological splendors of the village when a kid came running into me with a bat and shouted – “come, join us.” I obliged readily and was delighted when they offered me to bat first. For next 30 minutes, I was a kid among the kids.
When I was walking the lanes of Rishikesh, I bumped into a photographer from London who was searching for his ‘India Shots’ on the streets. We talked for a while and discussed of images we shot in the last few days. As he scrolled through his photos on the camera LCD, he paused at a picture of children playing cricket, looked at me and said, “this is what India means to me – it’s people, the temples, it’s culture, street cricket.. that’s where I see the real India.” I nodded, fully in agreement. That indeed, real India is.
