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COVER
STORY: KERALA
God's
Acre
Kerala
is now the undisputed tourism hotspot of India, the must-see destination
for heads of states, the wealthy, the tired, the been-there-done-that
crowd. This is a story about the USPs, colour and hardsell that has made
the state what it is.
Text
by Sudeep Chakravarti; photographs by Dilip
Banerjee
Carlos
dos Santos is being a very bad boy.
He is happy
even though he is not in Bahia, his bustling home town in north-east Brazil.
Sometimes he drags himself away from the plush resort in Mararikulam,
a speck near Alleppey, and plays soccer on the stunning, sprawling white
sand beach with boys from the nearby fishing village, using dried coconuts
for a ball. They tell him-so says Carlos, teeth flashing in a delighted
grin-you teach us soccer, we'll tell you how to live.
 Bad,
bad Carlos; a Brazilian, and he lets them get away with that blasphemy.
A professional musician by way of London, Carlos has done the wise thing:
he has given in to a life that is all about palm trees reaching for the
sky, a place so quiet you can almost hear the lotus bloom, where about
all the nightlife is when night turns to day. "We haven't seen anything
like it," he says, as his wife Georgia lazily turns the pages of
Anita Desai's In Custody. "I am at peace with the world."
These things
happen in Kerala, God's Acre, hotwired for people who crave a little soul
curry, who adopt the amazing inverse logic of an otherwise tumultuous
state: thalerade, don't be upset; this is what the world is coming to.
And it isn't
bad company. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his family are fresh
from some downtime at the Taj Kumarakom, a resort area skirting Vembanad
lake. (A week earlier, the Birla and Khaitan wives from Kolkata were in
for some ayurvedic R&R).
One evening,
as I finish a superb dinner of fresh pineapple basted with olive oil and
red chilli flakes, fresh mussels masala, seerfish steak and squid in one
of the world's best regarded ayurvedic resorts, Surya Samudra, draped
over a green waterfront hillside in Chowara, a casually dressed man walks
in and shakes hands all around. He's Jacques Lange, France's minister
of education."Kerala is magnificent, a place of great beauty and
unique culture," he says, and talks about Zingaro, an extravagant
musical that has for the past three years set Europe buzzing with colour-and
has movements taken from the state's martial art, Kalaripayattu.
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The livewire
who sits by a small campfire in Thekkady, a hillside away from the Periyar
Wildlife Sanctuary, nursing a nightcap, trading jokes with me about the
Government and raving about Kerala's scenery and its boutique hotels,
is Avtar Saini, Intel's South Asia head. Cricketer Anil Kumble just holidayed
in Kerala, ub Group Chairman Vijay Mallya drops in when he can, part of
a list of visitors that include Queen Elizabeth II, former heads of states
like Germany's Richard Von Wiezacker, actor Richard Gere, sundry ambassadors,
businessmen, politicians and socialites.
As the world
leans into 2001, this strip less than 600 km long and at its widest, 120
km- about the size of Jaisalmer district in Rajasthan's far west-with
stunning backwaters, impossible greenery, a range of ayurvedic massages,
great beaches, food and culture on call is, with the help of some slick
marketing, emerging as the pocket-venus of world destinations. If Goa
is where the world comes to party, and Rajasthan where it goes to be swept
up in martial history and faux royalty, the been there, done that crowd
is turning to Kerala when it comes to nursing the hangover and getting
a new life. The National Geographic Traveler famously listed Kerala as
one of the "50 places of a lifetime" among its millennium destinations,
along with the Taj Mahal-the only other Indian destination-Rio de Janeiro,
Venice, and the Great Wall of China.
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THE
PEACE FACTOR: Kerala has next to nothing by way of nightlife or action
that characterise boisterous places like Goa. Tourists, increasingly
the well-heeled variety, pay
Rs 4,000 a night and more to enjoy the tranquility of backwater cruises
in houseboats, unwind by a poolside at remote seaside resorts or even
to stay in rooms with a touch of history, heritage and charm. |
The magazine's
rave of "paradise found" is echoed
by publications across the world. Vogue showcased
Kerala in a "India Winter" package. Time magazine headlined
it "Afoot & Afloat - Kerala is worth the journey". Travel
& Leisure magazine's US edition called its experience the "best
breakfast in the world", extolling the virtues of uppuma, idli, puttu
(steamed flour and grated coconut dumpling eaten with curry) and dosa.
According to Cosmopolitan, it's "one of the ten love nests in India".
Lonely Planet, the English-speaking world's travel bible, calls it the
"land of green magic". And the French-speaking world's alternative,
Le Guide du Routard, drops all attempts at literary pretence in its preface.
"We're going to tell you something straightaway," the book confesses.
"We love Kerala."
It's as if
in the past year or so, more than 600 years since Marco Polo described
Kerala in purely commercial terms-"There is in the great kingdom
a great quantity of pepper and ginger and cinnamon and nuts of India"-setting
off Christopher Columbus, among others, on a wild chase for the fabled
Malabar, the world has woken up to a charm that the average Keralite takes
for granted. It's also a place many Indians have known for a long time
for its high-cost holidays, limited rooms, pilgrimage, spice and seafood
trade, industrial unrest, high unemployment, highest suicide rate, vitriolic
politics and educated locals who are rarely subservient- a trait not usually
associated with the travel trade.
On major
holidays, such as Christmas or New Year's, beaches across Kerala are practically
off-limits to everybody except rowdy fisherfolk. There is a near-total
absence of nightlife. From the tourism point of view, availability of
alcohol in hotels and restaurants is a nightmare, strait-jacketed by a
law that demands almost Rs 14 lakh a year for a bar licence; as for beer,
you have three choices: Kingfisher, Kingfisher and Kingfisher. The roads
are generally so bad that ayurvedic massage appears to have been invented
to soothe slipped discs, rattled nerves and necks stiff with whiplash.
There is such a proliferation of quacks that the Government closed 25
ayurvedic massage parlours last year after a Swiss tourist ended up with
a broken neck during a massage for cervical spondylosis. Sometimes, the
sparkling green of coconut trees is disturbed by posters extolling Che
Guevara and an incomplete revolution.
And still,
they keep coming, 48 lakh Indians, a majority being day-trippers to pilgrim
centres, and over two lakh foreigners a year-a doubling in five years-spending
up to Rs 15,000 a night for a room and Rs 75,000 for a full range of ayur-therapy.
The state that records among the highest urban densities in India somehow
manages to make space for people, with tranquillity and surprises to spare.
Olivier
Bonabel, a Frenchman and manager with GE Medical Systems in Bangalore,
can't get over what he calls the "duck curry episode" in his
life. Drifting along the backwaters near Alleppey, or Alappuzha as it
is now known, the owner of his kettuvalam, or houseboat, asked him one
evening: Do you want duck curry for dinner? Sure, said Bonabel. So he
simply moored the boat near a village, hopped off, bought a duck, and
voila! there was hot duck curry and rice. "I had the greatest, most
unexpected meal in my life. This place is so surprising." In Periyar,
as we travel the manmade lake that meanders through forests, the boatload
of noisy tourists quieten and speak in hushed tones. Not just to keep
from frightening away a herd of sambhar, wild boars, birds and nilgai,
but also in deference to nature. The honeymooning couple from Mumbai,
Kartik and Zarna Mehta, heir to a modest sari trading empire, stop their
patter about expensive taxis (Rs 1,400 for 100 km), communication problems
("They don't know Hindi and we can't understand their English")
and food ("very good vegetarian food but coconut in everything")
to happily mumble inanities. Looking at two necking cormorants, nature's
unabashed sunbathers who spread their wings to catch the last rays, Zarna
gushes in patois Gujarati, "so sweet, love karechche..." They
say they will be back; the place has them hooked. (Kerala is now firmly
on the moneyed Indian honeymooners' map; the day I was in Munnar, 20 of
the 43 rooms in the upper-end government-run Tea County Hotel were occupied
by honeymooners from Gujarat and Maharashtra.)
Exporter
Ashok Shahani from Mumbai, who says he has travelled all over the world
but hardly to any place in India because of the attendant chaos, is stunned
that his family's guide in the backwaters is a graduate in history with
a major side interest in ornithology. "He carries himself with dignity,
is polite, well-mannered and educated." His gushing approval rating
on his weeklong backwaters break: "11 out of 10."
Contd...
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