It was only two years ago that I had met Ana browsing through a book on Tagore at the little bookshop which is a part of our cafe in Santiniketan. We got talking, found many common interests and even went off on a trip to Darjeeling together. She left soon after but the friendship endured unlike that with many who pass through Santiniketan.
Ana, who is from Slovenia, lives and researches in London (strangely on the effect of Tagore’s writing on a poet of her country). Despite the difference in years, we got along so well that when Jessica, Ana’s landlady from London, came to visit her two years ago, she stayed with us.
It was then that we had decided to go on a trip together. So, last year, when we revived our discussion of the trip on mail, Jessica offered to drive us around UK and bunk with her friends. But since Ana was coming to Santiniketan anyway to finish her research work, we decided to do a trip in India instead.
And that is how Ana, Jessica, my partner and I found ourselves in Rajasthan doing the desert trail of Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Barmer. Almost all the people we spoke to in Rajasthan said that this year, for obvious reasons, the international tourist traffic was less than half. So when we went to see the forts in Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, they were relatively free of tourists and in fact refreshingly full of people from Rajasthan.
Despite that, or maybe because of the lower number of tourists this year, everywhere we went, our white-skinned friends created a stir. Considering how many tourists Rajasthan draws every year, I was surprised at the number of street urchins who wanted their photographs taken, the number of guides who followed us and the number of camel safaris that we were offered.
While Jessica went back from Delhi to face the snow in London, Ana came back with us to Santiniketan for some intensive studying before she handed in her thesis in June! While she has been studying in the mornings, as soon as it 3 pm she is out on her bike to explore Santiniketan.
At dinner when we speak about her day, it does become apparent that except for a few stares when she is travelling through adjoining villages, she hardly feels the colour of her skin in Santiniketan.
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It is a fact that Santiniketan attracts a lot less tourists than cities in Rajasthan, and that they are not as well off because Santiniketan does attract more from the world of artists and academia. And sometimes even those who cannot afford heating back home, can live comfortably on a budget of six to seven thousand rupees a month in Santiniketan for the whole of winter.
So the street urchins, the shopkeepers, the hotel owners and the taxi operators probably know that not much can be had by chasing the non-Indians. The well-heeled who come in big cars from Kolkata, oblivious of the amount of dust they raise on village roads, are far more likely to part with their recent wealth.
Or maybe in Santiniketan, the intellectually-ambitious concept of universalism has really taken root. Unlike Rajasthan, where most are still nationalists and therefore look upon foreigners as ‘others’, Santiniketan is truly more embracing. And despite the sliding standards of the Viswa Bharati University, the sad state of the Tagore museum, the overall lack of passion in those that are entrusted with taking forward Tagore’s vision, the seed of universalism that Tagore planted seems to have grown into a strong plant.
As I sit in our cafe in the evening and overhear animated conversations between the French, the English, the American, the Korean, the Japanese and the Vietnamese, I begin to understand what Tagore meant by one world.