By Kollengode S Venkataraman, (written in 2006)
Recently, I had to visit Phuket in Southern Thailand on the coast of the Andaman Sea, which is part of the Bay of Bengal. If you go due west from Phuket across the sea by over 1500 miles, you will be in Tamil Nadu.
Thailand is overwhelmingly Buddhist with strong roots in Buddhism’s Southern School, or Theravada School, in which the Buddha is seen not as God, but only as a spiritual role model for inspiration. There are exquisite Buddhist temples everywhere.
The hotel where I stayed was an hour from the airport. The landscape en route reminded me of Kerala where I grew up. Verdant hills and valleys with a variety of palm trees — coconut, arecanut, Panai, Eecham, and Kamugu — were everywhere. And then, the bamboo shrubs, banana trees, rubber plantations, hardy teaks, jackfruits, mangoes, tamarind, even cashew nuts. Water buffaloes and elephants were roaming along the road. Flowers too were familiar: kolambi, jasmine, pavizhamalli (frangipani), arali, Even the Thai letters in road signs and shop signboards resembled the curvy Malayalam script. If Kerala is called God’s own country, God was smart enough to make several countries his own…….
Phuket, an island 400 miles north-south, and 100 miles east-west at its widest, is very touristy, with over 50% of its population at peak season comprising of tourists mostly from Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Scandinavia, the Middle East, Japan, China, and now India. In the resort hotel where I stayed, the cable TV beamed programs in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and English programs from Australian TV, and BBC. The only American channels were ESPN and Discovery. No CNN.
On the basis of Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP, the per capita income in Thailand is $8100 (Ref: http://siakhenn.tripod.com/capita.html/ So with $1 ~ = 35 baht (the Thai currency), a few hundred dollars go a long way. So, if you are from the industrialized societies, you don’t have to be rich or sophisticated to be a visitor in Asia. The PPP-based per capita income in India is only $3000. So, dollars go even farther in India than in Thailand.
With 50% of the population being affluent tourists compared to the Thais, the entire economy is tourism-driven. With the tourists playing such a dominant role, the locals are forced to make every effort to gratify every need and every fantasy of these tourists. I leave the rest to your imagination, given that this magazine is read by school-going children.
Before improving the standard of living of the poor in India, the gora-friendly in India want to make India a tourist Mecca for relatively affluent international visitors, mostly Europeans. They need to go and take a look at Phuket at what would become of India if the brown sahebs succeed, given India’s poverty.
Desis are color-conscious. Not many desi men, not to speak of desi women, with brown skin tones developed over tens of generations and hundreds of years in evolution, would dare to bare their brown-skinned torsos and midriffs in pools.
In conversations on the Phuket beaches I heard and overheard, I was struck that even white women were embarrassed about their pale and pallid skin tones. Caucasian women coming from above the Tropic of Cancer were sharing their embarrassment in having to display their pasty skin in their swimwear.
This only confirmed my belief that there is nothing absolute in people’s sense of beauty. Whatever is relatively scarce in a given region will be considered something worthy of possession — lighter skin tones (at least “wheatish” as they say in Shadi.com) in the Tropics, and tanned skin north of the Tropic of Cancer.
I read somewhere that during Napoleon’s time in the 17th century, in palace banquets, while the emperor’s noblemen and noblewomen ate off gold and silver plates, Napoleon alone had an aluminum plate. Aluminum in Napoleon’s time was so rare that only the emperor could have it. (It is an entirely different matter that, given the excesses and debauchery of the nobility, there was nothing “noble” about them.)
When many svelte women were showing off their tan and trim waistlines in skimpy swimsuits in the hotel lobby; many 9-to-5 women tracing their stock to Northern Europe were embarrassed to reveal their not-so-svelte and not-so-tanned bodies even in the poolside and covered themselves with Turkish towels.
And past-middle-aged white men — Germans, Russians, Eastern Europeans — and a few Arabs were also in the pools. Many of them had pork bellies carefully cultivated over several decades of living on beer, vodka, bad food, and inertia. These men too were embarrassed and covered themselves with even larger towels as they walked in the hotel lobby.
In the bazaar outside the resort, the past-middle-aged male tourists with leathery skins, like Mahabharata’s Yayati, were refusing to age gracefully. They were hanging around with their Thai “girlfriends,” who were a few decades younger, and at least one hundred pounds lighter than themselves.
One sign of the Indians’ increasing affluence is their social and office functions organized in upscale resorts outside India. In India now, holding weddings in upscale hotels in big cities is prosaic. The in-thing is weddings in overseas resorts. In Phuket, there was a desi wedding — one Nitin marrying one Nayantara. Well into the wee hours of the Saturday night, one could hear in the hotel lobby and the bars upstairs Punjabi and Bollywood beats from the dance floor below. And the Indian operation of Max New York MetLife was having their annual sales meeting in the resort, with over 100 Indians participating in the meeting and the following revelry.
In the 1960s, with the US economy booming and the dollar soaring, many poor European immigrants who migrated to the US decades ago went to Europe with their families to see their ancestral land. This was the beginning of the guided tours. Remember the Hollywood movie If It’s Tuesday, It Must be Belgium?
While these loud Americans were happy to be everywhere during summer in Europe’s tourist spots — Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, Venice’s waterways, Rome’s cathedrals, and Parisian roadside cafes — the European natives only had condescension for these expats. This condescension was also partly out of jealousy. The term Ugly American gained currency not only in Europe, but also in the US itself.
Then, in the 1980s, with the strong Yen, it was the turn for the Japanese to become “ugly” and the butt of jokes in many touristy US cities like San Francisco, LA, NY, DC. These short Japanese men and women in their khaki shorts and T-shirts, with their expensive cameras dangling from their necks, were everywhere. Californian newspapers of that era, with their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks, recalling Pearl Harbor, were talking about the new Japanese “invasion.” Envy was part of this condescension.
These Japanese tourists would go in buses to the Golden Gate Bridge Vista Point in San Francisco, come out of the bus, and stand in line. One by one, they would take pictures of themselves in the same spot with the Golden Gate Bridge in the backdrop, and whoosh, off they go to the next photo-op spot.
Now, with India’s economic emergence, it is the turn of the Desis to be “ugly.” In Phuket’s hotel lobby, many Desis, almost all of them men, were loud. And in their Hinglish — Arre, Bell Boy ka call karo yaar thoda, or dekho yaar, idhar breakfast me desi fruits vagayara sub hai. Woh tasty bhi hai. They were as usual, late checking out and were in a hurry. Some were even trying to cut the line in front of the check-in counter in the hotel lobby, much to everybody’s annoyance.
End Piece: The Thai language is Sanskrit-based, with vowels and consonants similar to Indian languages. Even the names sound Sanskrit. The king’s name is Bumbol Adulyadej, which can be traced to Bhumi-Pal Atulya-Tej, which means Ruler-of-the-Land with Unparalleled Brilliance. END