"Incredible India"

This is hopefully the first in a series of Blogs that I will be writing while in India. The reason it is being written at all at the moment is because I'm not in India, even though by all accounts I should be. The reason I'm not in India, despite having a contract starting on the 7th of February and a flight arriving on that same day, is because I haven't received by Visa to go to India yet.
I applied for a work Visa (well, originally I actually was told that it was best that I apply for a student Visa, but after a couple of weeks I received news that I had/would be granted a work Visa- which cost a total of €330, btw) about 6-7 weeks ago now, and as yet I still am none the wiser as to when I'll get this Visa, what stage it's currently at, or whether I will get it at all. That's a long a boring aside though- well at least it's now become boring for me to recount the story :-)


The reason for this Blog (get used to these asides, readers...) is that I've seen a couple of advertisments for India on one of the channels here recently. They strike me as being a little strange.
(Here is another bad sign of things to come as I can't even find the damn ad on Youtube :-/
What one does in "Incredible India" apparently has a lot to do with finding sources of water- whether they be on a tropical beach, watching kids jump into the Ganges or canoeing along suspiciously green river: India has lots of places where you can find water. At first I was sure I was watching a new "fragrance for men" commercial- some fragrance to do with water.
Here's the wierdest thing though- in very few of the shots do you actually see any... Indians. Most of the activities seem to involve our hero doing things on his own, or with fellow (non-Indian) tourists. There is one shot of him participating in the "paint-throwing" festival, where he does actually bond with some friendly-looking Indian guy.
Firstly, I thought this was a bit wierd, especially for a country such as India, being one of the most populus in the world, but also one where you hear from so many travellers that it also feels like one of the most populus. Simply put, there's always people around no matter where you go (and more so in the popular tourist destinations)- so get ready for it! Most of all, I think this is what they should be promoting- surely one of the attractions of India isn't the wide open spaces and lying on beaches or peacefully floating along in a canoe- but seeing the sea (of people!) everywhere and experiencing their way of living.


But then this got me thinking- this isn't what most tourists think of when they travel somewhere. Most tourists don't think of the people in Vietnam, Mexico, Namibia, you name it... they think of the beaches, the sights, the animals, the national parks... so India better try and get on that tourist bandwagon! It's something I've always thought of as both a strange motivation for travel (sightseeing), and a strange expectation. You often hear travellers complaining about things not being as easy as in their home country, travel organisers being anything but organised, etc. But surely they were prepared for things to be different when they came- after all, they're travelling in a different country FFS!
Where was I going with this? Absolutely nowhere- it was just notable to me that I guess someone working for the Indian tourist board knows how countries should be presented to potential tourists, and how that even in Indian Tourism advertising they can still manage a couple of nice destination wideshots and pass it off as the image of India they think the world should see.