Srinath Perur in Open:
It is a bit of a rowdy excursion. Right from the outset there’s an air of impatience, of raring to go. One middle-aged man boards the plane and finds his friend already inside and buckled up. ‘Kyon, badi jaldi hai jaane ki. (Why, you’re in a hurry to leave),’ he teases, and they slap palms together and laugh with a heartiness so intense that it sounds stagey. One man from my group negotiates a temporary mid-flight seat exchange to the seat in front of mine, next to the tour leader. ‘Dekho,’ he tells the leader, preliminary to a logistical conversation, ‘hum poora enjoy karne aaye hai. Look, we’ve come to enjoy fully.’ Which makes for as good a statement of our agenda as any. Almost to the man, we are a plane full of Indian men, and we are sex tourists bound for Uzbekistan.
More here.
