In a first-person essay published by Scroll.in on April 9, 2018, journalist Omkar Khandekar reflects on a month travelling around India with two friends from his British university: Stefan, from Austria, and Lena, from Germany. Their journey brought him face to face with a contradiction: strangers sometimes treated his white friends as extraordinary guests, while sellers and drivers sometimes assumed they could charge them more. The encounters also made Khandekar examine his own assumptions about white people and the privileges that had shaped his life.
These are Khandekar’s memories and interpretations, not a survey of Indian people or foreign visitors. Their value lies in the tension he records: alongside awkward attention and commercial pressure, the group also met people who simply took time to help.
The trip begins with a question: “Why me?”
At Mumbai’s Gateway of India, people asked Stefan to pose for selfies. One person even hired a Polaroid photographer. When Khandekar asked why Stefan was being singled out, the person replied, “Bhai angrez hai na”—“He is a foreigner.” Khandekar was left out of the photograph. Stefan’s response, as Khandekar recounts it, was: “Why me?”
The moment captures a difference in how the two friends were read in public. Stefan’s appearance made him a point of interest; Khandekar, an Indian travelling beside him, could become less visible. In his essay, this attention is not simply hostility or welcome. It is a kind of distinction—one that raises the question of why a visitor should be treated as exceptional in the first place.
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Attention could mean welcome, distance or a higher price
Curiosity in public
Khandekar says the group drew stares and approaches as they travelled, including on journeys from Delhi to Jaipur and Mumbai to Madurai. At one point, passengers offered them seats on a crowded bus. The essay places such gestures beside less comfortable encounters rather than treating either as the whole story.
Social distance at hostels
At hostels, Khandekar observed Indian backpackers staying in groups and glancing at his European friends. He also recalls a Swedish backpacker duo saying it felt “impossible to chat up girls” because “they have a shield around them.” That is one reported conversation, not evidence that hostel culture across India works in the same way.
Commerce shaped by assumptions
Auto-rickshaw drivers sometimes quoted the travellers much higher fares, Khandekar says. In Jaisalmer, a camel-safari operator told the group that high prices were an “industry norm” because they looked able to afford them. These are the author’s examples from one journey; the essay does not provide like-for-like fare data to verify how much more the group was charged.
At transport hubs and tourist sites, sellers approached the friends with “Hello friend!” and “Where you from?” before naming prices for goods. Khandekar presents the contrast as part of the trip’s central discomfort: attention could be friendly in tone and still lead into a transaction shaped by assumptions about a visitor’s money.
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Khandekar turns the question back on himself
The essay is not only an account of how others treated Stefan and Lena. Khandekar recalls that, as a child in Nagpur, he felt nervous around two white women. He wondered, “What if…they asked me to recite English poetry?” Later, while studying in the UK, working and socialising with classmates helped him see past accents and skin tones.
He also acknowledges that his opportunity to study and travel abroad depended on economic and educational privilege. That admission makes his reflection more complicated than a simple accusation: the same journey that exposed unequal treatment also prompted him to consider how his own expectations had been formed, and what circumstances had allowed him to revise them.
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A Delhi refusal reveals a gendered double standard
In one Delhi encounter, a man asked Lena for a selfie. She declined and asked Khandekar to say that she was his wife. The man accepted that explanation. Khandekar’s conclusion was pointed: “Lena won the argument, patriarchy won the day.” It is his reading of that incident: the refusal worked once it was framed through a relationship to a man, rather than standing on its own.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Practical kindness also belonged to the journey
The group’s experiences were not all uncomfortable. In Puducherry, a passer-by waited to help them find the right bus. In a village near Ooty, a resident persuaded a passing truck driver to take them back to their hostel. These moments matter because they keep the essay from reducing a varied journey to a verdict about strangers or a country.
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What “Atithi devo bhava” means at the essay’s close
The final scene is in a tour operator’s office, where the group sees the phrase “Atithi devo bhava”—rendered in the essay as “a guest is like a god.” Khandekar writes that the promise had been well kept: “everywhere they went, they were treated like demigods.” But the phrase lands with irony after the journey’s mix of special attention, social distance, high quotes and help freely given.
His closing wish is not to reject hospitality. It is to question the impulse to make visitors into gods. Khandekar hopes instead to tell his friends about the ideal when they are treated “not as gods but as one of us.” The shift is from exceptional treatment to ordinary equality: welcome a guest without turning their skin colour into a spectacle, a presumed budget or a reason to overlook the person standing beside them.
Read Omkar Khandekar’s original essay in Scroll.in.
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