ON THAT NOTE

Suresh Menon is a writer based in India. In his youth he set out to change the world but later decided to leave it as it is

Our columnist Suresh Menon wonders when travel will get fun again.

Let’s face it, life hasn’t got simpler. That it has is simply a line we are fed on a daily basis by geeks and those wanting to sell us gadgets supposed to make life simpler. I say this because it is that time of the year again – the time to plan your vacation. In the past, the planning was simple, and the vacation gruelling. Now it is the other way around.

Not so long ago, you rang up your travel agent (now an extinct species – sadly, we didn’t care enough), and he (or often she) did the rest. You might have asked the occasional question: Is hotel ‘x’ better than ‘y’? And the agent who didn’t know and had no way of knowing (this was before the Internet, remember), and ultimately couldn’t care less, simply tossed a coin in his mind and called ‘x’ or ‘y’ depending on how the coin landed. In his mind.

Some of the holidays I took out of Dubai when I was working there were orchestrated by professionals known as holiday consultants. If not actually extinct, that species must be on the endangered list now. This was basically travel agents who had traded up. They had better offices, plusher accents and more expensive haircuts. But they too tossed coins in their mind. Perhaps higher denomination coins which landed softly, but coins all the same.

Now the vacationer himself is the travel agent and holiday consultant rolled into one. Also medical advisor (do you need yellow fever vaccines?), local guide (how far is Ediburgh from Dunbar?), transport organiser, hotel booker, psychological companion (“avoid looking up at the works on the ceiling for too long”), tour guide and thinker-upper of family games.

All this I blame on the internet and its natural habitat, the mobile phone. How has life got simpler? Unless “simple” means “complicated” in the geek or marketing genius’s dictionary. Soon you will be able to check out the softness of the pillow and the hardness of the hotel mattress while sitting at home to help you decide on the hotel. How much more simpler is the mind-toss method!

The novelist Julian Barnes has written somewhere of a character who “didn’t really like travel. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.” Most people love all three – the idea, the memory, and the travel itself. What they don’t love is the planning, the paperwork, the online disasters.

In the next cycle of evolution, people will replace machines, and that’s when travel will become fun again. If you still think life has got simpler, raise your hand, or press a button on some gadget that will raise your hand.