AT YOUR SERVICE

THE CHANGING FACE OF INDIAN HOSPITALITY STILL BEARS THE INSIGNIA OF ITS HERITAGE AND TRADITION.

- Aman Nath

The trends in the 1960s-70s mirrored a time when foreigners were re-ignited with the 19th-century dream of visiting the Orient. But one had to be daring, with the fear of amoeba in food, dysentery from water, and the lack of air connectivity. Roads too were an adventure, with childhood notions of bandits lurking around every corner, just as we Indians thought we would be boiled and cannibalised in Africa because you only had access to comics and Tintin! It was a time when travel wasn't just about exploring, but also about surviving-an initiation of sorts into the wild, untamed beauty of India.

The next two decades changed much of this-both in perception and reality-but no one as yet thought India was insidiously slaving its way forward to overtake the economies that had ridden the mercantile waves of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries to colonise it and own the world as their own.