Destination: India
A Shrinking Planet Moment in Kerala
by Jim Benning | 03.28.07 | 11:36 AM ET
The first time he heard it, San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn thought he recognized something distinct about Krishna Praveen’s voice. As he explains in a column Sunday, Flinn met Krishna and his new wife on a canal in Kerala, India. They just happened to be staying on houseboats tied up next to one another. Then, as the two men chatted, Flinn discovered why Krishna’s diction sounded so familiar. We won’t give it all away, but let’s just say Flinn vowed never to curse on the phone when he calls tech support with a problem.
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Yahoo! BuzzThe World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Moonwalkers, Stardust and the End of the Earth
by Michael Yessis | 03.16.07 | 8:02 AM ET
We’ve done the math: This week, travelers have professed their interest in the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, India, Venice, Antarctica and hotels with a certain “je ne sais quoi de geek.” Here’s the Zeitgeist.
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Best Geek Hotels in the World
* Yes, that’s an equation-covered bed cover at Boston’s Hotel @ MIT.
Most Viewed Travel Story
Los Angeles Times (current)
Hey, Sin City Top This: Grand Canyon West’s New Skywalk
* Moonwalker Buzz Aldren will take the ceremonial first walk Monday. We still ask: What Would Edward Abbey Think?
Most Viewed Travel Story
Telegraph (current)
Getting It Om In India
Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Stardust Blown to Dust
* Of course there’s video.
Most Blogged Travel Story
New York Times (current)
Making a Pilgrimage to Cathedrals of Commerce
* It’s all about the 19th-century shopping arcades of Paris.
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Miss Manners’ Venice: In a Word, Civilized
Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (this week)
Antarctica: The Crystal Desert
* More on Antarctica: A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth
Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
Most Read Story
World Hum (this week)
Stephanie Elizondo Griest: ‘100 Places Every Woman Should Go’
Poverty Tourism: Exploration or Exploitation?
by Michael Yessis | 02.27.07 | 8:26 AM ET
The Mumbai squatter settlement of Dharavi is known as one of the biggest slums in Asia. “It is also one of India’s newest tourist attractions,” writes John Lancaster in a thoughtful story on the phenomenon of poverty tourism in this month’s Smithsonian. For a little less than $7, Lancaster joined a small group of foreign travelers to walk through Dharavi, “a vast junkyard, a hodgepodge of brick and concrete tenements roofed with corrugated metal sheets that gleamed dully in the sunshine.” And what do such tours mean, for the residents of slums, the entrepreneurs and the travelers?
The New Hot Job in India: Flight Attendant
by Michael Yessis | 02.27.07 | 7:21 AM ET
The country’s travel industry is growing so fast—50 percent last year, according to the Indian government—that Indians are clamoring to pursue careers in aviation. Indian women, in particular, are beneficiaries of the boom. “Until recently, many Indian families would have frowned on the idea of a young woman dressing in a short skirt and serving strangers on a plane,” Somini Sengupta writes in the New York Times. “But a rapidly expanding economy has helped to transform the ambitions, habits and incomes of India’s middle class in ways that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago, not least for young women.”
Related on World Hum:
* The Not-So-Glamorous Life of a Flight Attendant
* Singapore Girl: Icon, Anachronism, Winged Geisha and Pretty Young Thing
* Who Wears the Pants on Alitalia Flights?
* The Return of the Stews
Nation Branding: What the World Can Learn From Spain, India and New Zealand
by Michael Yessis | 12.21.06 | 7:30 AM ET
They’re “universally acknowledged to be the crown jewels in the recent annals of nation branding,” writes John Cook in the January 2007 issue of Travel + Leisure, the latest publication to address one of our favorite topics: how countries present themselves in an effort to lure travelers. Cook recounts success stories—Spain’s transformation from a “sleepy low-rent vacation spot for the British and German working classes to a hip, cutting-edge cultural destination” and New Zealand’s capitalization on its starring role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—but, more interestingly, also examines countries with branding problems. Among them: Serbia, Ecuador and Kazakhstan.
Pico Iyer: On Travel and Travel Writing
by Matthew Davis | 11.30.06 | 8:32 AM ET
Two decades after boarding a plane for the trip that would yield "Video Night in Kathmandu," Pico Iyer talks to Matthew Davis about fact and fiction, books he wishes he hadn't written and his humble beginnings as a travel writer.
A Guide to the ‘Middle of Nowhere’
by Jim Benning | 11.03.06 | 7:11 AM ET
Having created guidebooks to just about everywhere, Lonely Planet has set its sights on nowhere, and in a big way. We recently noted the release of Lonely Planet’s new literary travel anthology, Tales from Nowhere, which features stories from far-flung locales. Now comes the Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere, a coffee table book with arresting photos and short essays about middles of nowhere around the globe, from Bolivia’s Atacama Desert to India’s Himachal Pradesh. “For a supposedly social species, our appetite for space, wilderness and isolation is remarkable,” writes Ben Saunders in the introduction. “The phrase ‘middle of nowhere’ has wormed its way into our everyday language; we all know where it is, and we can all recount a visit there, but unlike the summit of a mountain, the shore of an ocean or a famous monument, ‘nowhere’ itself is harder to pinpoint.” Yet LP manages to locate it in more than 50 places, each of which can whet the appetite of those yearning for their own kind of nowhere.
Mumbai vs. Bombay: “Will Bollywood become Mumblywood?”
by Michael Yessis | 08.09.06 | 11:53 AM ET
“On Language” columnist William Safire is the latest to dig into why and how places around the world change their names. He covers the big recent switches—Bombay to Mumbai, Burma to Myanmar, Upper Volta to Burkina Faso—most of which have been inspired by efforts to eliminate remnants of their colonial past. But Safire also looks at another interesting part of the name-change game: The product angle.
Xeni Jardin Hacks the Himalayas
by Michael Yessis | 08.09.06 | 6:21 AM ET
This week National Public Radio’s “Day to Day” is broadcasting Xeni Jardin’s four-part series about how Tibetans are coping with encroaching technology. Jardin traveled through Tibet, India and China, and her reports explore “how Western ‘hackers’ are building low-cost communications networks to bring phone and Web service to displaced Tibetan refugees—and how native peoples are trying to hold onto their culture in an interconnected world.” Jardin has supplemented her stories with photos and audio on the NPR Web site, and extra commentary and video on her personal page.
Reading Rushdie in India
by James Mutti | 07.23.06 | 10:11 PM ET
He carried a Rough Guide on the subcontinent, but James Mutti also devoured "Midnight's Children," Premchand's "Godaan" and other classic works of Indian literature. Those readings, he later realized, influenced his experience of India.
Changing Times in Bangalore, India
by Jim Benning | 06.05.06 | 1:15 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times’ Vani Rangachar recently traveled to Bangalore, which is (somewhat famously) transforming as a result of a high-tech boon. She discovered a city unlike the one she’d visited as a child, when milk was sold, still warm, by a man milking a water buffalo in front of her grandmother’s house. “Those water buffaloes had long since vanished from Bangalore’s streets,” she writes in a compelling story. “High-rise apartment buildings tower where there were farm fields. In a city that once had no grocery stores, there is now a Food World, with milk and vegetables in refrigerated cases, freezers full of prepared foods and shelves stocked with Skippy. And my cousins do more than visit temples when they vacation. They relax at beach resorts, go white-water rafting or rent houseboats on a mountain lake.”
No. 3: “The Great Railway Bazaar” by Paul Theroux
by Terry Ward | 05.29.06 | 12:58 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1975
Territory covered: India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and Japan
No. 16: “City of Djinns” by William Dalrymple
by Terry Ward | 05.16.06 | 10:26 AM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1993
Territory covered: India
An intrepid Scotsman who undertook the adventures chronicled in his first book, “In Xanadu,” at the tender age of 22, William Dalrymple spent a year in Delhi to research City of Djinns. He and his wife, Olivia, set themselves up in a small flat near the Sufi village of Nizamuddin. The common characters who enter their lives—from an opinionated Sikh taxi driver to their frugal and frenetic landlord—are as carefully revealed as the eunuchs and dervishes Dalrymple meets. All prove inextricable from the city’s diverse fabric. The djinns—“like us in all things, but fashioned from fire,” spirits invisible to the naked eye and only seen during times of fasting and prayer—seem as elusive as the richly layered city itself in the end. Dalrymple’s informative historical narrative, carrying the reader from Delhi’s Muslim and Hindu roots to partition, never becomes dull or droning. It’s one man’s impression of one of the planet’s most fascinating cities. For those who love travel for travel’s sake and travel writing for the vicarious ride it can deliver, “City of Djinns” is a classic.
Chick Lit Around the World
by Michael Yessis | 03.22.06 | 10:30 AM ET
Rachel Donadio has a great piece in the New York Times Sunday Book Review this week chronicling the popularity of the oft-derided genre known as chick lit in countries around the world. It’s taken hold in India and throughout Eastern Europe. In Scandinavia, it’s marked by a “certain existential angst.” In Indonesia, it has inspired a related genre known as “fragrant literature.”
Goodbye ‘Calcutta,’ Hello ‘Kolkata.’ What’s in a Name?
by Jim Benning | 03.07.06 | 3:35 PM ET
To reflect pre-colonial times in India, Calcutta has become Kolkata, Madras is now Chennai and Bombay has become Mumbai. More and more Western newspapers are using the new official names in datelines—the Los Angeles Times made the change Monday. In an eloquent piece in today’s Times, David Lamb wonders what’s lost when such iconic names are tossed into the “historical scrap pile.”