The use of incense dates back thousands of years, yet when it comes to incense in American cities these days, I associate it with Indian restaurants, yoga studios and head shops hawking bongs and tie-dye T-shirts. I also think of the glory days of the hippie trail, when young Western kids set off through Asia and, as Rory MacLean writes, “lit sticks of incense, strummed their guitars and read another chapter of Siddhartha, then stepped off the bus to help push the decrepit vehicle over the Hindu Kush.”

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Once again, it’s the French, Indians and Chinese, according to an annual survey of hoteliers by the French version of Expedia. The latest poll of 4,000 hotel employees in Europe and North America calls the French out for being impolite and unwilling to communicate in foreign languages, deems the Japanese most liked and declares the Italians best dressed.

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The animals were looking for refuge from monsoon rains, and they found it on the runway at Indira Gandhi International Airport yesterday. For a while, at least. 

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If you go to the outskirts of the Indian megalopolis, home to the shacks that house the poorest of restaurants, you may see benevolence dispensed in “a quintessentially Mumbai way.” A fascinating New York Times article explores the culture of “hunger cafes,” where starving men wait for commuters to roll down their windows and donate a few rupees for a 25-cent lunch of curried gruel and rice.

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The New York Times’ T Magazine features Pico Iyer’s latest story, a chronicle of a trip to the northern Indian region of Ladakh. He writes: “[W]ord has got out that here is a remote, unusually undeveloped ‘paradise,’ to which, of course, we bring our own, very different images of paradise.” Sometimes, as we know, paradise even involves shopping centers.

Related on World Hum:
* Q&A with Pico Iyer: On ‘The Open Road’ and 30 Years With the Dalai Lama

Photo by Koshyk, via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Perhaps it’s due to jet lag—I just arrived in London and have been forcing myself to stay awake to adjust to the time change. Or maybe it’s because I was reading The Post-American World on the flight over and had just come across this line: “The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood.” Whatever the reason, I was taken with this shrinking-planet shop-window display I just passed in Soho:

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Nice Mother’s Day piece by Jeff Greenwald about a trip to India with his 75-year-old mother. “Not only was this my mother’s first trip to Asia, but she and I had also never traveled together,” he writes in the Los Angeles Times. “And although she had been to Israel and Europe, including Russia, India was something else entirely.”

Great piece in the Washington Post about a new multiplex theater opening in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The country lifted a longtime ban on screening Indian movies in February, and now the country is poised for a movie—and cross-cultural—boom. 

Calvin Trillin’s look at the fate of hand-pulled rickshaws in Kolkata (aka Calcutta) leads a terrific package on the subject in National Geographic. “To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw,” he writes. “Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa.”

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You want bad travel news? We got your bad travel news. The dollar’s tumbling value in Japan is today’s big headline. (Japan-bound budget travelers might want to cancel that hostel reservation and book a night here.) But the dollar has been sinking around the globe, from euro-land to India, for some time now. Get this, from the AP: “At the Taj Mahal, dollars were always legal tender, alongside rupees, for entry into the palace. But because of the falling value of the dollar, the government implemented a rupees-only policy a month ago.”

Related on World Hum:
* Three Travel Tips: Ways to Save Money in Europe

Photo by Delvis via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

Expat stories about maids and servants who come with a house abroad almost always make me wince. Alternately condescending, clueless and gloating, the stories are often never more than apologist reactions to a complicated cross-cultural issue. 

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The 1960s icon and one-time Beatles guru helped put Rishikesh on the counterculture map and inspired countless young Westerners to wander East across the Hippie Trail. He died Tuesday at his home in the Netherlands at the age of 91. Just how great was his influence on travel?

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