Why isn’t India the tourism capital of the world?

 

Image generated by Gemini

There is no reason on the face of the earth (pun intended) for India not to be the tourism capital of the world. From the lofty Himalayas and the Thar Desert to one of the longest coastlines in the world and from historical monuments and a cultural heritage that goes back several millennia, India offers more in spades than any other nation in the world. It has ski resorts and beach resorts, jungle safaris and desert safaris, alpine forests and mangrove forests, mighty rivers and serene lagoons and everything else you can imagine, like exotic tropical islands and even an active volcano! Medieval palaces, forts, ancient temples, a millennia-old classical music tradition, a cuisine more varied than any other, and a unique way of life that has evolved over thousands of years.

There is nothing that any nation in the world has that can hold a candle to what India has to offer. It compares favorably with Rome and Egypt when it comes to ancient architecture, and its cuisines from across its various regions rival those of France and Italy. India's ski resorts are no less than what Switzerland offers, and its thriving wildlife offers more than what Africa does. From the frozen deserts and icy rivers of Ladakh, to the aquamarine waters of Andaman and Nicobar islands and from the rugged river-carved canyons of Gandikota and Bhedaghat, there isn't enough space to go into the details of what India offers the world. Yet, the international tourist arrival numbers for India are abysmally low.

France, a nation one-fifth the size of India, attracted 89.4 million visitors in 2024 (the highest in the world), when compared to an extremely modest 20.57 million international tourist arrivals in the same year. In fact, India did not even make it to the list of the top 10 nations attracting international tourists, being left behind by countries like Spain, Italy, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, China, Thailand and Mexico.

India earned as much as $35 billion from international tourist arrivals in 2024, a figure that would have been a whopping $151.4 billion if something like 89 million international tourists had arrived in India instead. That is not all that far from what India earns from its IT exports. Does one even begin to fathom what kind of difference that would have made to the Indian economy? With all that India offers, isn’t that a criminal waste of opportunity for a nation that has more to offer than any other in the world?

Why doesn’t India get the numbers?

If India doesn't get the international tourist arrival numbers it deserves, it has to be on account of the fact that very few of the international travellers who come here recommend it heartily to their compatriots back home or want to visit it again. This occurs because of the fact that India still has infrastructure issues. Rail, road and air connectivity have come a long way in recent years, but are still pretty inconsistent, with last-mile transportation often not being up to the mark.

India has many world-class hotels, some of which make it to several international lists of the world's greatest hotels, but it does not offer much by way of affordable accommodation comparable with other major tourism destinations. In particular, there are issues with regard to safety and hygiene, especially in areas that are not part of the well-known tourist circuits. International tourists expect things like clean public restrooms and the availability of safe drinking water, wherever they visit, no matter how remote the place may be.

Some international tourists might get put off by what they might perceive as restrictive visa rules. This is especially evident when you compare the tourism visa policies of other tourist destinations around the world. One would do well to make it possible for international visitors to come for even short-term visits, allowing them more flexibility when it comes to travel planning.

While India is a budget traveller's paradise, given the high number of expat backpackers you see in the country, the mid to high-end tourists often face quite high costs. Then, there is the question of the high taxes levied on hotels and travel services. To top it all, hotel rates and airline ticket prices are exorbitantly priced during the peak season, often making the visitors consider other destinations to visit.

Lastly, India has been rather lacklustre and inconsistent in showcasing its offerings in the world tourism market when compared to other countries like France and Italy, which have been able to develop a strong brand image in terms of what those countries offer to visitors.

How to turn the tide?

 

The critical building block with regard to putting India on the path to achieving the number one tourism destination in the world is to carry out a massive upgrade of its infrastructure.  Improvement in road connectivity, adequate accommodation of internationally acceptable standards and massive across-the-board improvement in hygiene and sanitation levels not just across the tourist destinations, but across the country. This entails a massive investment, which will pay back handsomely in the times ahead.

The safety and security of all tourists-domestic and international, have to be a matter of national pride and importance. Not only does it entail better policing, but also making the people realise that they have a stake in ensuring that the world sees India as a great place to visit, where the people are warm, friendly and well-disposed to people who visit their land. It would, in fact, be a great idea to train people throughout the length and breadth of this vast country to participate in the growth of the tourism sector. They could become a part of the very lucrative hospitality industry, helping them raise their standard of living.

India has a head start in digital connectivity thanks to its impressive mobile connectivity and the very successful rollout of its digital payments infrastructure. This can be leveraged by putting an integrated ticketing system in place. Besides, one can use apps and deploy AI to help tourists discover incredible India and make the best possible travel plans with ease and convenience.

India is a land that, at some level, beckons and fascinates the world, and this has been true since the dawn of history. In offering people everything that is good, profound and sublime in the world, it shows them the layered, intricate, diverse and nuanced aspects of its way of life. Visiting India in many ways is like finding the meaning of life itself.

We in India owe it to ourselves to show the world the very best of what India is. If we do that, there is no reason why India can't be the number one tourism destination in the world. In so doing, we will not only contribute massively to the enrichment of this vast and ancient land, going back millennia, but also bring the world closer to it. As the old Indian saying goes, "The World is One Family."

Startups in the world of AI

 

                                                                     

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Is it a great time to found a startup at a time when AI seems to be poised to impact every aspect of human endeavour and activity? Do the tremendous efficiencies that are said to accrue from deploying AI make it far easier to run a successful startup, or do the complexities arising from its adoption make things difficult?

With small businesses being the backbone of most nations’ economies, both in terms of GDP and private sector job creation, can artificial intelligence-powered startups achieve breakout growth through market-disrupting innovation? The fact that startups have access to easily available open-source tools, as well as a huge amount of high-quality data, does give them a leg up with regard to coming up with out-of-the-box solutions that are unconstrained by the hitherto high costs of research and development that something like that might have entailed in the past.

With innovation being made so much easier to achieve, even the smallest of startups can match the operational efficiency of much larger organisations. This empowers them to function in a nimble and super-efficient manner, enabling them to make lightning-fast strategic moves like rapidly coming up with new iterations and aligning very quickly to any market changes.

On the flip side, the high rate of obsolescence of the cutting-edge solutions offered by AI means that startups will need to work very hard to maintain their competitive advantage in the market. They could get trapped in a treadmill kind of race that hampers growth. Constant innovation and adaptation do not necessarily lend themselves to growth and stability, for a startup, as it would not be able to find its feet in terms of zeroing in on a niche for itself. Then there is also the fact that the regulatory landscape is evolving with regard to grappling with the cons of AI, like data privacy, algorithmic bias and ethical concerns about its use. Also, given that AI open source tools are available to everyone, the advantage evens out, and it is quite challenging to apply a given AI technology in a manner that others can't replicate.

Is AI- A Game Changer for Startups?

At the core of starting a new business lie its viability and chances of finding success. The very best of business ideas might not stand muster in a tough and cutthroat marketplace. It is important that your product or service should not only have sufficient demand, but that you should also have a fair idea of who your target audience is, as well as have your financial planning sorted. Besides, you should be aware of the kind of competition you face. On top of all of that, you need an insightful marketing strategy to achieve your sales and revenue objectives. While in the past you might have needed to hire experts to guide you with all of the above, you can now use AI to help you through all of these processes cheaply and in double quick time.

AI can help startups personalise marketing campaigns, carry out precise market segmentation enabling better targeting, leverage predictive analytics allowing for strategic decision making, and optimise the marketing & sales processes. It can also help with compliance related matters,   enhance security and protect against fraud. What’s more, it can also help a startup attract funding from investors by helping it get its financial analysis right.

Startups in the world of AI largely have a good thing going. Artificial Intelligence levels out the playing field for a lot of small-time entrepreneurs who were looking to launch their startups, but were intimidated by the challenges involved. In fact, there was never a better time for startups to launch, scale up and rule, the challenges notwithstanding.

 

 

The Age of AI: Finding Employment 5 Years From Now

 

Photo by Tim Gouw: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-white-shirt-using-macbook-pro-52608/

The world is sitting on an unemployment time bomb, the like of which it does not fully fathom at the present moment. This is because the way AI, IoT, and robotics are incrementally advancing in their capabilities, there is no field of human endeavour that will escape unscathed from the ever expanding tentacles of these technologies in the not so distant future.

While this will be immensely beneficial to the corporations that own and control these technologies, what of the people at large? Ultimately, there is also the not so unreal or unlikely doomsday prospect of AI becoming fully autonomous, going rogue, and deciding to take the destiny of humans and indeed all life forms, for better or worse, into its own hands.

This may not happen in the next 5 years, but who knows? When you might have possibly created and unleashed a Frankenstein’s monster, do you have any clue about what the consequences might be?

Moving on to more immediate matters at hand, are we prepared for the massive unemployment crisis that the world faces in the very near future? Imagine a future where there are no human teachers, engineers, doctors, accountants, cab drivers, pilots, actors, poets, painters, or farmers?

Not all of that will come to pass in 5 years, but some of it might. Are we even thinking about it? The way things are evolving with regard to the incremental adoption of cutting-edge technologies like AI, IoT, Machine Learning, and robotics, most of the jobs in 5 years from now will pertain to managing and harnessing these technologies across sectors.

It certainly makes sense to equip yourself with skills that are likely to be in demand in this new era of technology. By all means, attend all the online courses available out there that teach you about AI, IoT, Machine Learning, and all the stuff that is deemed to be important. Stay in the know about the developments that will have a bearing on your future career prospects and ensure that you have a healthy online presence that helps showcase your skills to potential employers.

But the nagging question is, will there be any real need for what you and millions of others like you bring to the table in this new technology (not human) shaped world order? The answer is that one does not know. While it is true that the advent of any new seminal technology always comes with its own share of challenges, but ultimately becomes mainstream and always opens up new pathways of employment after the dust settles, we are dealing with a whole new phenomenon here.

The sheer scale and frequency of change ushered in by the fascinating as well as scary bouquet of  AI technologies (including Generative AI) have seemingly made it impossible for humans to keep pace and pivot to newer ways of performing a job. For whatever you might think you can do better than an artificial entity, it will be proven false faster than you thought was possible. For instance, the impending arrival of Agentive AI, with the ability to make autonomous decisions  without human oversight and thereby achieve predetermined objectives, promises to be a total game changer in terms of what it will be able to achieve and accomplish. That is because Agentive AI will be able to think critically like human beings and be able to display initiative in dealing with complex environments all on its own. What on Earth would you need humans for?

The high priests of technology are, in fact, quite upfront and honest about the likely detrimental impact of advanced technology on people’s job prospects in the very near future. For instance,Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company that came up with Generative AI assistant Claude, believes that Artificial Intelligence might replace 50% of all white-collar jobs in the next 5 years. 

Elder statesman and politician Bernie Sanders has expressed his fear that the benefits of AI will accrue only to billionaires, shining a light on an expected struggle against corporate greed as well inequity brought on by the AI revolution.

Nothing highlights this more vividly than the New York Times article about the  catastrophic state of employment amongst recent fresh college graduates, with more and more companies looking to deploy AI in preference to recently graduated college students.

The world needs to wake up and smell the coffee now. A strategy has to be put in place to ensure that AI and all the other wonderful technologies that it incorporates are harnessed to serve the interests of everybody and not just the all powerful tech giant or those in a position of authority over the common man. Using it to fight disease, illiteracy, and climate change, for example, is something to look forward to, but not deploying it to serve the economic interests of a few.

Like democracy, we have to ensure that technologies like AI are for, by, and of the people and used for their common good. The necessary rules and regulations have to be framed and implemented so that their use is property codified and works within a system. Above all, people’s right to work and a livelihood must be strengthened by technology and not decimated. The time to act is now.

The World of AI is Here and There is No Escaping It

 

Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-bright-lights-373543/

In the good old days, when AI was something that nobody had really heard of or cared about, you would come across stories of alien invasions in the shape of literature or scary sci-fi movies. These would more often than not paint bleak dystopian scenarios of hostile alien takeover, which would in most cases be thwarted either by nature causing the aliens to die off or involve the humans getting their act together and ridding themselves of the extraterrestrial menace that threatened their existence. Sometimes, as in the movie Avatar, the human race were the aggressors in far, far away galaxies.

 So much were people taken in by the whole business of the possibility of hostile aliens lurking amongst us that people routinely started reporting alien and UFO (Unidentified Flying Objects). Why, the US Air Force even launched an official investigation, which went under the name of Project Blue Book, to probe purported UFO sightings. 

 While the world still obsesses with alien life and UFOs, with conspiracy theories being a dime a dozen, people are now assailed with the prospects of a life altering event that is no less scary than a full blown alien explosion- the advent and rise of AI. Technological advancements in the realms of AI, Internet of Things, and Machine Learning threaten to make mankind redundant in the sense that every economic and social function that it performs can be carried out artificially in a much more efficient manner by such technologies. 

 From teaching, reading, and writing to healthcare, art, entertainment, factory production, banking, and military functions everything can be performed by artificial entities, increasingly without much human oversight. The way that technologies pertaining to these are advancing, the day is not far when there will be no human involvement in the decisions such entities will make. Who is to say how these autonomous entities empowered by artificial intelligence might evolve with regard to their thought process? Could they decide that the human race itself, with its proclivity to exploit and damage the very resources that nurture it, should be put to sleep and a brave new world order comprising indestructible machines or robots who exist in perfect harmony with its environment? 

 The fact of the matter is that the world of AI is here, and there is no escaping it. The question is, what are we going to do to prevent its complete takeover of our lives and ultimately our very existence? Do we have it in us to ensure that AI is leveraged as nothing more than a very useful tool that can help us do the various things we do efficiently? If you hire a househelp, you do so to make your life easier and not let your househelp become your overlord who will decide your fate. 

 Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a cohesive worldwide strategy to regulate the use of AI. It has been left entirely to the captains of the ever-expanding and growing technology behemoths for whom profit trumps every principle known to lead to the betterment of humankind. That cannot augur well for the world. Look at the way that the unregulated access to social media has wreaked havoc with the development of the impressionable minds of children and teenagers around the world.

 We cannot even begin to visualise the kind of capabilities AI will possess in five to ten years from now. It will be able to bend our notion of reality as we now know it and replace it with another one, which could possibly be more bizarre than we can possibly imagine. Is “progress” worth that kind of price? This is something that the greatest scientific minds of our times have been repeatedly pointing out to us, and we better pay attention. AI has to be regulated, controlled, and tamed. It is a matter of our very survival

A Concrete Cage: How Big City Living Can Squeeze the Life Out of You

 

Photo by Fabio Souto: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sao-paulo-urban-cityscape-with-modern-architecture-33263986/

Living in a big city is soul sapping, especially if you have grown up in a small town. You invariably move to a big metropolitan area for reasons of growth and ambition, attracted no doubt by tales you have heard of wealth and fortunes made by others when they similarly left their small town homes for the big city. But when you arrive there you are immediately intimidated by the scale of everything you encounter.

 Yet your ambition drives you on and you throw yourself into getting to know your new home and learning the big-bad city’s ways until you are fully incorporated into its pulsating rhythm.

 Slowly, but surely you achieve everything you ever dreamt of and often more than that. But the big city extracts a price in terms of changing the essence of you. It strips you of your simplicity and your sense of justice and fair play and feeds your ego in a manner that nothing comes in the way of your goals. Some hold on to some semblance of who they were once and find that comes in the way of getting ahead of others. Many take leave of their moral compass and make their life all about achievements, conquests and acquisition.

 A bigger house, a second and third house, a fatter bank balance, a trophy spouse, a luxury car, expensive holidays abroad and all that. You forget that your life is finite and with each passing day you have one day less to live. Living like there is no tomorrow wrecks your mental peace and your physical well-being.

 

It has to. Even machines break down. You are but a human being and cannot forever be in high gear in pursuit of more and more. Living in a big city puts you on a hamster wheel, where the purpose of your existence is satiating your never ending greed.

 

A big city is like an empire- it feeds on growth driven by pure unadulterated greed and ambition, which is accomplished by the exploration of others. Just like an empire had its heyday and a decline and a fall, one’s life and time in a big city gives you the highs and then lays you low. You suffer physical, mental and spiritual fatigue. A distance develops not only from your family and friends, but you yourself.

 

You feel the need to reconnect with who you were and rediscover the sense of peace and balance you once had. Going to live in a small town that is still connected with nature can help you do that. Live a simpler life with simple everyday goals like buying milk from a neighbourhood vendor or walking in the nearby woods inhaling air that is pure and not spiked with hydrocarbon fumes heals you physically and mentally and restores peace to your soul. The slower rhythm of life brings deep peace in your life allowing you to sleep like a baby. Every day you wake up to a morning that makes you feel that you are happy to be alive.

 

Keeping things simple and opting out of the race to acquire more makes your life worth living again. You value the time that is left for you to live much more, counting every second that you get to live a blessing. You finally do things that are truly important to you like spending time with the family and not staring at a computer screen. You read those literary masterpiece that you always wanted to instead of immersing yourself in inane and endless social media interactions. When you travel, it is with the intention of discovering a new place that you haven't visited before, but always had on your bucket list of destinations that fascinated you. You go there not to advance your career, but to please your inner self- your soul.

 

The big city will always be there, beckoning you with its beguiling charms, but you may no longer care for those. You have moved on.