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It took an effort to rouse me from my post-lunch slumber on Virgin Atlantic’s Jumbo. My watch told me I had been asleep two-and-a-half hours. Impossible, I said to myself, this must be a trick of time zones. Why is it that an afternoon nap always seems sinful? I looked for scapegoats in the splendid lunch I had put away with the help of a glass too many of good Australian wine. Mostly, I blamed the Upper Class bed, which Richard Branson claims is the widest and longest in the field. Guilt was quickly forgotten when I looked out. Our plane was swooping down to land at Barbados, and it was a scene straight out of travel brochures: dazzling white sand, the sea a deep clear blue.

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Sometimes it’s good to have no pre-conceptions of a place, but it struck me as odd that in spite of the blanket coverage of the World Cup, our knowledge of the Caribbean Islands was zero. All I knew was that it produced cricketers, rum and fish.I also had the vague notion that the place, though not a begging bowl area, wasn’t particularly well off either.

Imagine my surprise when I found that Barbados, the most easterly of the Caribbean Islands, is regarded as the world’s number one developing country. It owes much of its wealth to tourism and its proximity to the United States (four hours from New York). An additional factor is its political stability: when Britain granted it independence in 1966, it left behind a vibrant parliamentary democracy and strong democratic institutions. Since then Barbados has added other sources of revenue to its economy, notably business and financial services. Agriculture, particularly its traditional sugarcane plantations, continues to be an important factor. Barbados’s prosperity is certainly visible.
There are Mercs and Beamers and Lexuses all over and the sea is full of very, very expensive yachts. Perched next to the Atlantic Ocean, water and water sports are
important tourist attractions.

And thereby hangs the point of this article. The head of Virgin Atlantic in India is an Englishwoman who has spent years in the Caribbean. On her first trip to Bombay, she packed her swimsuit into the very top of her bag. “Can’t wait to get into the sea again!” she said. The Indian staffers in the room went very quiet. As she drove from Bombay airport to the hotel and looked at the sea, she realised why.

Most places in the world that are near the sea consider themselves lucky. The waterfront becomes the focus for tourists and locals alike, with resorts, entertainment, sports and restaurants spread across the beaches to take full advantage of sea and sand. Everywhere, that is, except Bombay. Here we seem to have an antagonistic attitude, as if the vast gift of the Arabian Sea is our Public Enemy Number One.

What else can explain state-sponsored hostile acts like discharging the city’s sewage into the sea? And, discharging it raw and untreated? What else can explain the
unfettered use of pristine beaches as defecating grounds for the city’s vagrants? What else can explain the uncontrolled growth of bhelpuri and kulfi stalls on Chowpatty and Juhu beaches, till there were so many hawkers and beggars that you couldn’t see the beach for them? It took a determined effort from Pramod Navalkar at Chowpatty and from citizens’ groups in Juhu to reclaim the beaches for us.

Barbados’s enchantments, though, don’t lie just in its waterfront activities. There is also an old world charm about Bridgetown itself. Its streets remain narrow, its buildings are of the old colonial style, built to a human scale (which is still retained). Amazingly, the commercialisation and trinketing which mar the beauty of most tourist destinations have been determinedly kept at bay. Bridgetown is what our tourist attractions could be, but aren’t. And to think that all this has been achieved by a nation whose first inhabitants were indentured labourers from Africa and Asia and where slavery was rampant till two hundred years ago, and our pre-conceived notions of culture and heritage go out the window.