Skip to main content

TAJ (Agra) : Tourists and Health

Image
By
The Taj is iconic of Indian tourism and perhaps draws the largest number of International tourists. Those who dare to visit India and Agra are charmed and awed by the pristine and majestic beauty of this marble edifice.  It is a common site to see International tourists arriving in air conditioned buses, huddling in groups with mineral water bottles in their hands, posing for that drawing-room-mantle photograph with Taj in the background, and then wrenching their noses and stealing glances at the squalor around the city of Agra darting off back to Delhi.
We are lucky that the Taj and Agra are in India and in Uttar Pradesh, and that it is a monument admired and sought after by tourists from across the world, but can we market the Taj alone without improving the surroundings, the city of Agra and the fabled Yamuna that are so intricately entwined with each other?
Tourists are warned before arriving at Agra to be careful of vendors, touts and self styled guides who might take them for a ride, or perhaps even rob them, to be careful with the food and water they consume – safer to carry your own water and to eat at their starred hotel, that they should not venture out into the city unescorted, that they should stay huddled together and not wander off anywhere on their own, and that they should carry their medicines as attacks of tummy cramps, loose motions, vomiting and fever often come free with their Agra package!  I marvel at the tourists who do finally make it to admire the beauty of Taj with so much weighing on their minds.
Any one visiting Paris or Heidelberg would recall how tourists are made to feel safe to wander anywhere they wish on their own, browse through curio shops in small streets, sit at roadside cafe’s or bistros and taste the local cuisine or wine, watch the clear waters of Seine or Neckar rivers and perhaps take an exhilerating boatride and come back safely to bed in their hotels with a dream-cum-true feel. 
If tourism in Agra has to get the much needed boost, we need to look beyond the Taj. Yamuna needs dredging and cleaning and its banks need to be made free of strewn multicoloured polythene bags. We need to ensure that shops selling “pethas” are hygienic even for the delicate western tummies, that hoodlums don’t cause uneasiness to visitors, that roads are indeed safe not just from goons but also the police, and medical help of international standard is available a phone call away to make our visitors feel safe and reassured. They will then be able to ejoy the beauty of Taj much more and encourage their friends too to come to Agra, UP and India.
As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Doctor’s Dress

By
The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...
2 comments
Read more

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

By
In an attempt at trying to do well to those they love, spouses and parents often enforce diets on patients of liver diseases that often turn out to be detrimental. The commonest food fad is pale insipid boiled cabbage being doled out to nauseous patients suffering from hepatitis that makes them puke even more.  The liver, in a way, is a buzzing manufacturing unit that requires lots of energy to keep its multiple functions going. And it derives all this from the food we eat. During disease, such as during an attack of jaundice, when many of the liver cells get killed, the liver attemptsdamage control by trying to regenerate quickly. For its cells to multiply however, it requires a generous supply of energy that comes from carbohydrates, and protein, the building block for its cells and tissues. Boiled green vegetables unfortunately have neither of these. Hence the situation often progresses to that of a starved liver unable to recuperate due to cut-off food suppl...
2 comments
Read more

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

By
One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...
1 comment
Read more