Or perhaps, The last word in Fashion. Or Glamour.
I feel absolutely cheated. I was conned into spending 100 bucks for a Zoom: Isske Dekho magazine in the disguise of a travel magazine. If Aishwarya the globetrotter is on the cover of this one, I insist on Ian Wright being returned the favour in the next issue of Filmfare. And till date I thought Vikram Chatwal was a hotelier. So I’m not sure if I he is The Last Word on Travel Essentials. Not carrying a Prada toilet case won’t take away from my travel experience, or most travellers’ for that matter. I really have no qualms about luxury travel, but if you are doing a travel piece on Varanasi, you will get thousands of interesting faces to shoot and feature. You really don’t need a model and highlight what designer she is wearing and how much it costs, with poor Varanasi a mere blur in the background. William Darylymple, Suketu Mehta and Shashi Tharoor sure glam up the contributors’ list, but it’s irritating to dig out their writing from a mammoth bin of ads for products that cost the earth and are by and large useless for travel. Fatima Bhutto is beautiful and a good writer. But her piece on Karachi is the stuff memoirs are made of. What’s the point of a guide to a city most Indians are likely to never travel to coz they won’t get a visa thanks to our great camaraderie with the neighbours? It further acts as an agonising teaser for my travel hungry heart, if nothing else. I could go and on, but it’s not just about resentment. It’s more a pity that the Last Word in Travel cooks something that barely smells of the true spirit of travel.
