Skip to main content

Travel blues

Going on a vacation? Wow! Lovely! You are sure to have a lot of fun. Sunny beaches, lush mountains, heritage sites, or rolling meadows and green forests, a holiday to any one of these is just what the doctor ordered to beat the stress of regular life. Sit back and relax or go adventuring, its your call. You are going to have a great time, right?

Wrong! Because you need to stay somewhere and what you see is hardly what you get in holiday stays. Pardon me for cribbing, but all those rosy pictures painted by websites and travel brochures usually are just that - rosy pictures.

Lets do a reality check of all the marketing hype around places to stay:


  • "Serene, calm, cozy resort in the midst of lush green forests that are abundant with flora and fauna" usually turns out to be a bunch of huts in the middle of nowhere, devoid of any amenities, where spending a night tackling power-cuts and mosquito bites turns out to more of an adventure than the forest trail 
  • "3-star facilities with spa, gym and pool, multi-cuisine restaurant, spacious rooms with all modern amenities" looks great on websites. In reality, you find the restaurant serves only Punjabi and Indo-Chinese food, and most of the items are unavailable. The room AC is erratic, the room itself is cramped with furniture, with hardly space to move about. The spa and gym are, well, closed for renovation.
  • Home-stays promise "great experience of warmth and hospitality, in the comfort alike that of home", but what you get are dirty linen and inedible food.
  • Beach and mountain resorts have only a few rooms offering views (of course, that is only natural, these are 3-D structures after all), and these are always booked. So you find yourself waking to the sight of a kitchen garden or if you are lucky, the backside of the resort. 

But you are on holiday, right? So whatever would not be acceptable otherwise, you swallow easily and happily, because you are determined to have a good time.

And isn't that what the holiday spirit is all about? So, bon voyage!  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Does Mother Mary Really Come? You bet!

Prolific writer-activist-thinker Arundhati Roy's memoir, an ode to her mother's formidable personality, is cleverly titled, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Below the title is a picture of young Roy nonchalantly smoking a bidi. Irreverence, thy name is Arundhati Roy! At 372 pages, it is a tome, a sweeping saga that recollects both her mother's remarkable life, as well as her own. Is it a Memoir? Yes and no. Though the book title refers to their mother-daughter relationship, the book - at several junctures treats each one of them as independent and exclusive from one another. In fact, for a good part, her mother finds no mention at all, and the reader is engrossed reading about Roy's exploits and struggles through Architecture College, early attempts to find her vocation and calling, her dabbling with cinema, acting, scriptwriting; her romantic liaisons with the luscious JC, Sanjay, Pradeep et al. A life as extraordinary and unapologetic as Arundhati's mesmerizes in itself. ...

The Sadness Within Us

A curious phenomenon has taken place over the years. Technology has advanced in leaps, modern medicine has become far more effective, we can control pain and disease far better, mental health is getting due attention, there are more avenues for creativity and entertainment.  Yet.... We are no longer able to be really happy. We are a chronically unhappy people. Forever dissatisfied, never content. Always thinking about the past or the future, never enjoying the moment. Think about it. When was the last time you were really, truly, wholly happy? Blissful, joyful? You slog hard at office, get that deserved raise/promotion, party hard to celebrate, and yet at the end of the day, a hollowness creeps in. An emptiness, a feeling of futility. You have a grand wedding - its the stuff Instagram dreams are made of. Your sweetheart looks like a million bucks with the latest designer lehenga, you yourself are spruced up, your family and friends are beaming, the event is going on swimmingly. Yet...

Emotional toil of festival times

Festivals are happy times, right? Time for merriment, revelry, celebration, enjoying yourself... Wrong! Studies show festivals call for a steady spike in stress levels. Cortisol shoots up, starting with preparation for festivals, and remains high throughout, in the quest to do everything perfectly, "at least during the festival". Guess who bears the brunt of this? Yes, its the one who takes emotional labour for everyone she cares for - the woman of the house. She wants everything to be perfect, so works her ass off tidying and cleaning things. Then she wants her family to be fed well, so spends hours toiling away making delicacies in the kitchen. Rangoli to be painted - there she is with the brush. Festoons to be hung up - she's balancing herself on a stool. Furniture rearranged, flowers put up, puja room decorated? Yes, only one person who signs up for all this. Then there's the stress of the whole family at home, stepping on each other's toes. She has to appease...