GLOBALISATION. The word has become old. It is so last decade. The fascination with a highly integrated world and nations is growing stale. The idea is now cliche. The globe has moved on.
However, the years in which the idea spanned research, books and all sorts of media and artistic representation, it created an atmosphere for many experiments, which have left as much of an impact on the world as the printing press did in medieval England.
After a burst of realising how similar we global citizens are and learning to connect with each other with scant appreciation of subtleties, we are now hopping firmly back into old territories which proclaim our individuality. This realisation of the unique self due to exposure to the universal set and an honest appraisal of the uniqueness on offer backed by the technology and knowhow to actually offer it, has created ripples and waves through every industry; spawning a plethora of start-ups, mom-pop shops and individual enterprises out of garages, kitchens and pavements, harassing the mighty giants of the industries like ants would an elephant.
The stately heavy weight industries with every garnishing of age old nobility, who belittled the kindling enterprises as a passing trend offering only baubles as alternatives and incapable of becoming serious competition or assuming their gigantic proportions as doyens of their respective industries, have realised to their dismay that just the way several small fishes move individually yet together in a school to mimic and project a large single fish that can thwart predators in the perilous oceans, these alternatives have coalesced to become its own industry – the alternative industry.
And a world that was growing tired of standardised everything – from food to hairstyles – the septic tank of one-size-fits-all that globalisation and traditional industry had created as a by-product, finally saw an outlet and what began as a trickle is approaching flood levels. What were considered trinkets have become streams defined as alternative (medicine, travel, farming etc.,) ad infinitum.
Celebrating uniqueness
Needless to say for a country like India which in its very essence is the union of several, who chose one alternative, the opportunities presented by such a market are, well, ad infinitum. As inheritors of an ancient way of life and having over the centuries infused several cultures into a lifestyle which continues to be an inseparable mixture of various cultural elements, there has always been more than one way of doing a thing or finding a solution. From Gods to grandma’s get-well-soon fixes, options have always abounded and this multiple choice heritage is finding great resonance in a world where globalisation and its largely Western derived consistencies are falling by the wayside.
While these options always existed for us in this land, the opening and understanding of this unique heritage of ours as compared to the rest of the globe, by us and people who think it as exotic, has created a broader industry within the various specific alternate streams – alternative tourism – where conventional tourism or visiting of a foreign country is combined with another stream of offerings unique to the particular destination country, and can be looked at in many ways as mixing work or obligations and wanderlust.
India’s biggest attraction in this market is undoubtedly the kaleidoscope of cultural diversity it has to offer in the different ways of life that have evolved in this ancient land settled by varied people, their dress, jewellery, dance, music, cuisine and architecture along with the unique customs, traditions, fairs and festivals; a firsthand encounter of which can truly be a burst of several flavours to be sampled in one country on one visa.
A branch from the same tree creates the alternate religious tourism circuit offering a peek into some of the most ancient religions and traditions in the world. As a birth place of four major world religions – Hinduism, Jainsim, Buddhism and Sikhism along with an ethos that blends Islam, Sufism, Christianity, Zoroastrian faiths and several others in a distinctive manner; it offers perspectives that are difficult to accumulate in any one land.
The geographical diversity of the subcontinent provide an ideal platform to indulge in land, water and aerial adventure activities, which though in a nascent stage as compared to other countries specialising in any one articular activity, holds unimaginable potential throughout the subcontinent. Its sister alternatives of eco-tourism, wilderness tourism and sports tourism are languishing in the same dark hole of inexperience and apathy towards the giddying possibilities that lie in store.
Besides this historical and natural legacy, the modern face of an educated India with open markets and a drive towards being reckoned with the first world industrialised and developed countries have created other niches which the connoisseurs combine with the age old ritual of travel and tourism. Chief among them remains business tourism where tourism is combined with business while attending meetings, conferences or formalising of business transactions. Agro and food tourism forms an alternative which borders between being one that is inherited through the traditional agrarian nature of the economy and populace’s mindset, along with the stupendous business potential that the country’s large tracts of fertile land have to offer.
The emergence of a large educated set of professionals in a country which holds education in high esteem and importance has created an environment of a huge set of top notch professionals, while the competition has kept the prices competitive while providing services which cost a fortune in many countries. This holds especially true for health tourism, mainly the medical profession and has launched the trend of several patients opting to perform procedures, especially routine ones, which are frightfully expensive in their own country in the best hospitals of India and before or after recovery taking in the sights and sounds of the country – still at a fraction of the cost it would have taken them to carry out only the medical necessities in their domicile. Related streams of wellness, ayurveda, yoga, spiritual and naturopathy as both preventional and alternative healing centres are gaining ground in a world where people want to veer off destructive allopathy towards more natural substitutes. The alarm of drug resistant strains of several diseases is adding to the need to experiment with such options.
Alternative tourism – big enough yet?
To call alternative tourism an industry may just be, in my opinion, a bit of a stretch just yet. While many of the categories read like parts of traditional mass tourism, perhaps the major distinguishing factor here is the intent of the tourist – to come to the tourism destination solely for that particular activity because of it being better, unique or considerably cheaper as compared to the tourist’s home country. Irrespective of whether the activity or place being visited may be in the list of most publicised and frequented tourist attractions of that country.
This thin edge of the tourism wedge still has a long way to go in India as it battles the familiar demons of ignorance towards its nature, dimensions and even the power of tourism itself. A lack of ability to determine level of sustainable development, to manage the tourism itself and control its development along with a lack of appreciation of its impacts as a formal industry combined with a lack of agreement over levels of development, control and the future direction of tourism itself are keeping these innovative sparks of enterprise from becoming a roaring flame. Like in all things, the survival of the fittest and the most lucrative will determine which of these shall in the coming years be called sporadic or seasonal and which makes the leap to being an industry born of the doings of crazy minds. For me, the biggest concern and challenge that alternative tourism will come to face is its perhaps unintended projection of being ‘appropriate tourism’.
The world is in a flux. It is larger in terms of access and smaller in terms of ease of access than it has ever been in the earth’s history. Perception and opinion are as fickle as the incessant quantity of information being churned out. Absence of any level of filtering or authenticating between genuine and sensational data being made available en masse holds a greater threat to the bud of alternative tourism than its actual potentials or strengths. And finally it will be retweets, likes and rating stars that will determine the fate of these gladiators battling it out on the sands of a global digital colosseum.