Travel : Discrimination against Desi BackPackers!!!

Where shall I begin this sorry tale?

All budget hotels listed by lonely planet for white backpackers charge twice as much room rent from desi (brown) backpackers.

All Rich/Well-to-do Indian tourists who talk to you like equals dump you like the dickens when they find out you are a desi back packer… the way rich people proverbially avoid the poor.

White back packers don’t even believe that Indian backpackers exist!! But your best bet for conversation is from white student backpackers and from the Indian masses. However when the Indian masses who have opened their hearts to you in Gandhi class find out you have a master’s degree and used to be a prof.. a sudden coolness fills the atmosphere.

The thing is that there is no stereotype for desibackpackers!! A young non-bavarian german student told us that there were no Indian backpackers!!! To our very almost blackened-in-the-sun-once-brown faces.

We stayed at Holiday Inn, Havelock Island and Tango Resorts Neil Island. Both budget resorts told us that Indians (Desis) were charged twice as much because they never stayed long. A white mexican student who stayed next door told us that he was staying for the exact same duration and that he was paying Rs 300 a night where we were charged Rs 500/600 a night. He also told us that there were some hotels that told him no vacancy to his face even when it was clear ther were rooms.

I asked him to check his food bill and I checked mine. All food items and cool drinks are not only highly inflated on the price menu, but the actual rate applied to the item was even higher than the amount on the menu card at this Holiday Inn. Also they never present you the bill after each meal so you don’t sign off on any amount. At the end of a long period they will give you an arbit list of food and rates and totals.. and you have no record with you to dispute this.. This is how the poor backpackers are fleeced. Since Indians are likely to head off and fill up on samosas by the road-side the “captive customers” ie the white backpackers must be paying a lot more than they should be!!

By the way these resorts also encourage stray dogs which whites love and desis don’t. These dogs won’t shoo., they are so unafraid and trusting. And they crap all over the place..

The highlight of the Holiday Inn resort is that it is on the shore of one of the finest beaches in the world and as your conciousness melts with the divine consciousness in the sea.. you can’t think anything except – swastirastu, s’antirastu… may there be good, may there be peace!!

The Tango resorts waiter at Neil told us that Desis can only “sneak in” as customers in the off-season.. and that we would have never got in the good season when the place would be restricted to whites only….

If this didn’t feel bad enough, the govt charges desis 10 times as much boat fares as islanders or residents..

Only God loves desi backpackers on these islands… certainly no humans seem to!!

The silver lining is that Mahindra is planning to enter the “budget resort” space.. so we may still yet rule..!

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