If it’s Saturday, it must be — “Pune” suggested my wife as I struggled groggily to remember in which city her call had woken me up. “That’s next week, unless this week is already next week,” I informed her. “I’m in” – peering at the hotel stationery that mentioned the name of the hotel but not its city — “Hyderabad, though it might be Chennai.” It turned out to be neither, which I discovered not during the course of the day but the following morning, at the airport, when I showed my ticket to the person manning the security, who prompted booted me back to the tail-end of the queue with a chastising lecture that if I intended to board a flight from Bengaluru, I needed to show him a ticket from Bengaluru, and not Mumbai, or Chennai, as I was apparently doing.
Pushing a punishing itinerary across several cities on a promotional tour, it felt surreal to arrive at a destination and not know where I was. Over the last years, all airports have developed a sameness that is alarming; all hotels resemble each other; and even the FM stations that cab drivers seem partial to, sound the same. If the gobbledygook I had been assaulted with for several days seemed any indication, I was being subjected to south Indian babble though my north Indian ears failed to distinguish the nuances of Malayalam from Telugu or Tamil. “Kannada,” my colleague corrected me, reminding me yet again I was in Bengaluru — now, if only I could find my ticket.
Did I say all hotels look the same? Let me correct that to mean they look similar — but try finding where to charge your phone and you’ll soon realise that if one will require you to crawl under the bed to find a socket, another will need you to disconnect the uplighter. Nor are these the only disingenuous ways to distinguish one from the other. In one, the bedside switches control everything but the lamp, which, mysteriously, can be switched off only from the corridor outside the bathroom. As for showers and faucets, it is impossible to tell the shower from the tap, or to get warm water and not a scalding cascade, or an ice-cold pour. Are pillows meant to smother you with their softness, or cause a crick because they are unyielding?
Where their services celebrate diversity, hotel coffee shops can only be described as monotonous. From stale fruit platters and soggy scrambled eggs to gosht for dinner and salad for lunch, buffets are ennuingly analogous. Time was when you could tell a city from its cuisine, but with everyone demanding pizza or pasta instead of Chettinad or Syrian-Christian, all food now looks and tastes the same. When I had biryani packed from Chennai instead of Hyderabad, and failed to get brownies from Theo’s in Mumbai, there was hell to pay at home, but when I decided on chocolates from Fabelle in Bangalore, I was flayed because “How many times do I have to say that nobody eats truffles at home?” my wife castigated me.
I’m on a flight as I write this, but I’m not sure where it’s headed. Presumably I’ll know when we get there. If it’s New Delhi, the chauffeur will be waiting to pick me up; if it’s elsewhere, I might ask the Uber driver where I am at the risk of being considered mad. Or I’ll try and make sense of the drivel on FM — provided it’s in a language I can understand.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
