The travelling Indians .. in Switzerland, too :)

The Roma set the trend in trotting around the world, starting from India.  For a while, I think people from India lost their wanderlust--perhaps that coincided with the European colonialism and then, to quote from my graduate school days, the systematic development of underdevelopment. 

Now, once again, we are wandering around, sometimes as tourists and other times as immigrants.  Sometimes, it is both--as immigrant tourists--which is what happened over the Fourth of July weekend when my cousin, her husband, and I went to Crater Lake.  The three were in three different political categories: he is an American by birth to parents who immigrated from India.  She is an immigrant who is a permanent resident.  And I am a naturalized American.

At Crater Lake, it seemed as if every third tourist had Indian blood.  I helped a couple (both Indians) take photos with the lake as the background, and the wife seemed like she was relatively new in the country.  Vans and cars of traveling Indian families ... A chai wallah could have made quite a few dollars there :)

Apparently, Indians are crisscrossing all over, and up in the Swiss mountains too, as this NY Times story reports (ht).  However, the Indo-Swiss tourist connection is thanks to Bollywood:

For years, Bollywood’s producers and directors have favored the pristine backdrop of Switzerland for their films. The greatest of the Bollywood filmmakers, Yash Chopra, is a self-professed romantic who has made a point of including in virtually all his films scenes shot on location in this country’s high Alpine meadows, around its serene lakes, and in its charming towns and cities to convey an ideal of sunshine, happiness and tranquillity.
In the process, they have created an enormous curiosity about things Swiss in generations of middle-class Indians, who are now earning enough to travel here in search of their dreams.
“The moment you cross the border it is something else,” Mr. Purohit said, “where the scenario changes.”
“No noise, no pollution, no crowds,” said Kamalakar Tarkasband, 72, a retired army officer.
Swiss tourism officials and their Indian counterparts are capitalizing on this obsession. The number of nights spent by Indian tourists, who come mostly in summer (few ski), has doubled in the last decade to 325,000, and the numbers continue to grow.

It is a similar story with people from China too.  As the Chinese gain disposable incomes, they too are exploring the planet.  Good for all of them, I say.  It is a sign of growing affluence in countries that were once depressingly poor (though, as I noted even earlier in the day, poverty persists!)

Anyway, as the Roma know well, "different" could also mean trouble, as even that NY Times piece reports:

In June, the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger featured an article with the headline “Into the Luxury Hotel with a Gas Cooker,” noting that “in some hotels an entire caste of guests is no longer desired: the Indians.”
The article catalogued the complaints of hotel managers: guests who cook curry dishes on camping stoves in their rooms; guests who use bath oils that blacken tubs; guests who book for a husband and wife, only to show up with the entire family.
In Engelberg, where a visitor is more likely to encounter a woman in a sari than hear the clang of a cowbell, some European tourists are unsettled.

Well, here is a song/dance clip from one of the movies mentioned in the NY Times piece--Sangam:

Yes, the songs from this movie are all classics.  An uncle had a record player, and when I was a kid I recall him playing another song from this movie for me because he said it was dad's favorite ... and that one is: