The history of the people of Pakistan is re-written while the history of the Pakistani landscape is allowed to disappear.

Maldives segregates the locals from the tourists, and sells sun, sand and coral.  

"It is all in the Access" Subhash Goyal is the president of the Indian Association of Tour Operators, besides being the chairman of STIC (Student Travel Information Centre) Group, and a long-time spokesman for the Indian tourism industry. What follows is his conversation with Contributing Editor Mitu Varma, taking in the critical aspects of the Indian travel industry.

In domestic tourism, the Bengali was there first, before the Gujarati, the Punjabi, or the Maharashtran.

At the fifth Joint Convention of the Pakistan-India Peoples´ Forum for Peace and Democracy, everyone´s eye was on a young Karachi-based journalist, Nasir, his wife and two minor daughters, honorary child delegates to this gathering in Bangalore. When he had first sounded them out about going to India, 6-year-old Zoya had innocently piped up, "Hamara India!"...

Mizoram´s turn around can show the rest of India´s Northeast what a cease-fire can do. But with peace here progress must not take too long.

Loss of branding For a long time now, I have been unhappy about the "South Asia" fixation a lot of US-based Indians exhibit. For some reason, these people cannot conceive of anything "Indian" it has to be "South Asian". I object to this on several grounds: a. loss of branding, b. catering to American prejudice, c. intellectual laziness.

IC-814 had many firsts to its credit. It was the first international flight to have been hijacked in over half a century of civil aviation history in Nepal (there was a hijacking of a small domestic aircraft in the Panchayat period). The taking of the Indian airlines Kathmandu-Delhi flight also became the first incident of its kind in the history of international aviation which led to the suspension of all flights by a commercial airline to the 'culpable' country. IC-814's was also the first made for-the-media hijack drama of the Subcontinent, and it was played long and loud — with many take offs and landings and then a lonely tarmac in Kandahar — much to the delight of the Indian satellite channels. Indeed, the purveyors of satellite media turned the ordeal into a commercial event akin to an extended Indo-Pakistan test series, and Zee News in particular transformed it into a soap opera. Even traditional media —leaflets and wall-posters — were brought into action to berate the country where the IC 814 originated.