School days are back

Some weeks ago, a Canadian student on an outdoor leadership course that I was helping with, picked up a battered guitar in a Himalayan village. It was a small specimen, almost toy-like and neglected with its strings gone loose and an aged frailty afflicting its wood.

The young man — who back home in Montreal majored in mechanical engineering and minored in music, and worked part-time to make ends meet — was probably yearning for strains of music strummed the old-fashioned way. He pleaded with the tea shop owner and quoted Rs 2,000; the deal was sealed for Rs 2,500. Several days later, as we discussed how the month-long backpacking course had played out, he said, “ I know I paid more but I can easily recover that money in less than a day’s work.”

Then

When I was in school, the globe-trotting foreign tourist was a marvel. True Indians are more welcoming of fair-skinned foreigners than they are of each other and their skin.

But it was also clear that the foreigner was more confident, less wary of alien lands, contently holidaying on a beach chair at Kovalam while we took mere breathers between conspiracies to improve self-worth. They even rode in on magnificent bicycles and motorcycles still sporting the dust of a passage through Patagonia or Pamir — all places we read of in geography text books.

They did it. We dreamt it. Those were my school days. Blame it on economics being taught much later in the curriculum, the role of currency in confidence and well-being was a delayed realisation.

But going to college as I did in the late 1980s and then commencing careers in the early nineties, lessons in economics and seeing economics in action in India was heady experience. With the worst supposedly behind us, we seemed set to be foreign tourists, possessing strong currency and enjoying genuine holidays.

And now

I don’t need to detail what happened. We were condemned by busy economy, rising population, social conditioning and avarice to never know what a proper holiday is.

Adding insult to Indian insecurity, decades after liberalisation our currency hit lowest ever against the dollar. It makes a mockery of hope and worse, with domestic inflation added to the brew, even that beach chair of my dreams is a rickety, broken one. My friends don’t agree.

They say forget the dollar, for Indians are travelling and exploring like never before. It isn’t economics, they argue, it is hope and hard work. Well, I am short of the first and not a perennial fan of the second. I wish for a miracle. Wake up one morning and find my one rupee buying 56 American dollars.

I am helped out of bed by a travel agent with tickets to Alaska, Siberia, Scandinavia, Patagonia, and God knows where else; the tickets held like a paper fan in the hand. In some remote mountain village, I stop by at a tea shop and buy an ageing guitar for music the old-fashioned way.

There, at that point when I should explain affordability, I guess, I snap out of the dream. But should it persist, I promise you Phil, my friend from Montreal, that I will sing a Gordon Lightfoot as gratitude for this rumination on the rupee and an article written thereby.

My friends have hope despite the dollar at 56; I have dreams of Yukon instead. Dreams are for free. School days are back.

(The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.)

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