Khajuraho has been a tourist destination for many decades, because of its significance as a heritage site, a significance that is enhanced by its UNESCO World Heritage Site status.
The demographic profile of the tourists who visit Khajuraho is, and has been, predominantly an international grouping.
In 1992 this group included people of all ages, and tending towards those from western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan.
Since January 2010 the new "Tourist Visa on Arrival" scheme has encouraged tourists from a number of designated countries, to add to these tourist numbers. These countries include Japan, Singapore, Philippines, Finland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar and Indonesia.
Tourism is the largest service industry in India and is projected to represent about 1% of the global tourist population by 2021.
Khajuraho is a standard destination on tours that take place in the region of northern India that has become known as the "golden triangle". India's golden triangle is originally a tourist circuit which connects the national capital Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, but this has been extended to other prime "cultural heritage" locations, primarily because of the ability for tour operators to fly their customers from place to place on their tour itineraries.
Khajuraho Airport services flights to Delhi and Varanasi. The airport, or aerodrome, is 3 km south of Khajuraho Town, and has been recently been completely transformed and "modernised" to create an improved "impression" for the international and national passengers as they arrive and/or leave Khajuraho.
When it was opened in 1978 to facilitate tourism to the nearby UNESCO world heritage site temple complex, it really was just an "aerodrome".
"By speed-up, the airplane rolls up the highway into itself. The road disappears into the plane at take off, and the plane becomes a missile, a self-contained transportation system. At this point the wheel is reabsorbed into the form of bird or fish that the plane becomes as it takes to the air."
As Kipling says; "transportation is civilisation"!
Marshall McLuhan in his chapter on WHEEL, BICYCLE, AND AIRPLANE, to be found in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) refers to an airline executive who was "much aware of the implosive character of world aviation" and;
asked a corresponding executive of each airline in the world to send him a pebble from outside his office. His idea was to build a little cairn of pebbles from all parts of the world. When asked, "So what?" he said that in one spot one could touch every part of the world because of aviation. In effect, he had hit upon the mosaic or iconic principle of simultaneous touch and interplay that is inherent in the implosive speed of the airplane. The same principle of implosive mosaic is even more characteristic of electric information movement of all kinds.
(p. 198)
This chapter nineteen in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man of 1964 is followed by a chapter on THE PHOTOGRAPH that is subtitled:
The Brothel-without-Walls
Was McLuhan thinking about The Museum without Walls by Malraux, but in a way that is more to do with photography than art, and considering how photography, as a medium, does not simply represent the world, but substitutes itself for the world? McLuhan says:
Mass-produced merchandise has always made some people uneasy in its prostitute aspect. Jean Genet's The Balcony is a play on this theme of society as a brothel environed by violence and horror.
The avid desire of mankind to prostitute itself stands up against the chaos of revolution. The brothel remains firm and permanent amidst the most furious changes. In a word, photography has inspired Genet with the theme of the world since photography as a Brothel- without-Walls.
Nobody can commit photography alone.
It wipes out our national frontiers and cultural barriers, and involves us in The Family of Man, regardless of any particular point of view. A picture of a group of persons of any hue whatever is a picture of people, not of "colored people." That is the logic of the photograph, politically speaking.
But the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.
By the same token, the complete transformation of human sense-awareness by this form involves a development of self-consciousness that alters facial expression and cosmetic makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance, in public or in private.
This fact can be gleaned from any magazine or movie of fifteen years back. It is not too much to say, therefore, that if outer posture is affected by the photograph, so with our inner postures and the dialogue with ourselves.
The age of Jung and Freud is, above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of self-critical attitudes. This immense tidying-up of our inner lives, motivated by the new picture gestalt culture, has had its obvious parallels in our attempts to rearrange our homes and gardens and our cities.
To see a photograph of the local slum makes the condition unbearable. The mere matching of the picture with reality provides a new motive for change, as it does a new motive for travel.
Daniel Boorstin in The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream offers a conducted literary tour of the new photographic world of travel. One has merely to look at the new tourism in a literary perspective to discover that it makes no sense at all.
To the literary man who has read about Europe, in leisurely anticipation of a visit, an ad that whispers: "You are just fifteen gourmet meals from Europe on the world's fastest ship" is gross and repugnant.
Advertisements of travel by plane are worse: "Dinner in New York, indigestion in Paris." Moreover, the photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
Professor Boorstin seems unhappy that so many Americans travel so much and are changed by it so little. He feels that the entire travel experience has become "diluted, contrived, prefabricated." He is not concerned to find out why the photograph has done this to us.
But in the same way intelligent people in the past always deplored the way in which the book had become a substitute for inquiry, conversation, and reflection, and never troubled to reflect on the nature of the printed book. The book reader has always tended to be passive, because that is the best way to read.
Today, the traveler has become passive. Given travelers checks, a passport, and a toothbrush, the world is your oyster. The macadam road, the railroad, and the steamship have taken the travail out of travel.
People moved by the silliest whims now clutter the foreign places, because travel differs very little from going to a movie or turning the pages of a magazine.
The "Go Now, Pay Later" formula of the travel agencies might as well read: "Go now, arrive later," for it could be argued that such people never really leave their beaten paths of impercipience, nor do they ever arrive at any new place.
They can have Shanghai or Berlin or Venice in a package tour that they need never open.
In 1961, TWA began to provide new movies for its trans-Atlantic flights so that you could visit Portugal, California, or anywhere else, while en route to Holland, for example. Thus the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other medium.
It is well known that even museum curators often prefer colored pictures to the originals of various objects in their own cases.
In the same way, the tourist who arrives at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Grand Canyon of Arizona, can now merely check his reactions to something with which he has long been familiar, and take his own pictures of the same.
To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game.
For the untrained awareness, all reading and all movies, like all travel, are equally banal and unnourishing as experience. Difficulty of access does not confer adequacy of perception, though it may involve an object in an aura of pseudo-values, as with a gem, a movie star, or an old master.
This now brings us to the factual core of the "pseudoevent," a label applied to the new media, in general, because of their power to give new patterns to our lives by acceleration of older patterns. It is necessary to reflect that this same insidious power was once felt in the old media, including languages.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. Some feel keenly that speed-up has impoverished the world they knew by changing its forms of human interassociation.
There is nothing new or strange in a parochial preference for those pseudo-events that happened to enter into the composition of society just before the electric revolution of this century.
The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.
This would seem to be a normal, and even amiable, trait ensuring a maximal degree of social continuity and permanence amidst change and innovation. But all the conservatism in the world does not afford even a token resistance to the ecological sweep of the new electric media.
A garden gnome travels the world . . .
Amélie
(also known as Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain; French pronunciation: English: The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain) is a 2001 French romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Written by Jeunet with Guillaume Laurant, the film is a whimsical depiction of contemporary Parisian life, set in Montmartre. It tells the story of a shy waitress, played by Audrey Tautou, who decides to change the lives of those around her for the better, while struggling with her own isolation.
Amélie secretly executes complex schemes that affect the lives of those around her. She escorts a blind man to the Métro station, giving him a rich description of the street scenes he passes. She persuades her father to follow his dream of touring the world by stealing his garden gnome and having a flight attendant friend airmail pictures of it posing with landmarks from all over the world.
Culture Is Our Business is Marshall McLuhan's sequel to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. Returning to the subject of advertising newly armed with the electric sensibility that informed The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan takes on the mad men (a play on the ad men of Madison Avenue) of the sixties. Approaching commercial messages as unacknowledged art forms and cultural artifacts, McLuhan delivers a series of probes that pick apart their meanings and underlying values, their paradoxes and paralogisms, and their overt function as persuasion and propaganda. Through humor, satire, and a poetic sensibility, he provides us with a serious exploration of the consumer culture that emerged out of the electronic media environment. In keeping with the participatory ethos of the Internet that McLuhan so clearly anticipated, this is a book that is meant to open the door to further study, reflection, and discussion, and to encourage the development of critical reception on the part of the reader.
If life were only like this . . .
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