The Curious Epidemic of the Restless Indian

Oh, So You Haven’t Travelled This Weekend?

Congratulations, India. We have done it. We have decided that the act of sitting at home—on one’s own couch—is something only the unfortunate and the utterly unimaginative do.

Where are all the others? Everyone else is somewhere else.

Everyone is flying

When you step into an airport on any given day, you are treated to a scene never seen before. You would be forgiven for worrying there was a mass evacuation notice from the Government that you had missed while you were sleeping. Thousands of people are spilling out of crowded taxi lanes, ready to storm the terminal. Bags of all sizes are being hoisted from boots: some the size of shipping containers, others neon-colored trunks with Mickey Mouse smiling vacantly from the back. It is not just the adults; even the newborns have luggage manifestos of their own.

The gates are simply inadequate; they resemble a border crossing with hundreds of refugees fleeing a regime. “Bottleneck” is the only word for it. Some gates have security personnel manually squinting at passports; others have Face ID scanners. Both seem to operate at the same glacial speed. The face scanner invariably makes you perform a three-act play before it recognizes you. Either the scanner is a moron, or the man who designed it was.

The security check is a polite stampede. Laptops, cables, chargers, headphones, belts, shoes, and jackets are all stripped off and dumped into plastic trays like offerings to a fickle god. Then, the world moves in reverse just a few feet away across the X-ray machine. It is an imaginary line separating two different states of being: one side is disrobing in a panic, and the other is dressing up in a fury. The bags get refilled, trousers are secured and the cables pushed back into the bags in haste.

Some travel with a single backpack; others with an entire wardrobe. One is hopping over to meet a friend; others are heading for a wedding or something equally celebratory. Weekdays are no longer spared. What used to be the exclusive domain of formally dressed sales reps hunting for business is now a chaotic mix of everyone.

The coffee shops inside are packed. One could manage a month’s household expenses with what a single Dosa costs here. The beverage prices could buy you the same liquid in tankers from your neighborhood shop. But they are always full; everyone arrives famished and devours the overpriced carbs just before boarding. Money can always be earned, but when will you next get a 500-rupee Dosa? The “experience” is the high. Budgets can wait; the boarding call cannot.

We are a nation on the move. People are migrating across the country for jobs because no one has a hometown that provides a “meaningful” career anymore. The major cities are the lure. The businessman needs to expand, and that means travel.

Rail is rile now

It is not just the airports, mind you. Railway stations have evolved into a kind of organized, beautiful chaos that would make an old-timer weep. Every train is overbooked. The Tatkal quota, once a desperate last resort, is now the default setting for the modern Indian traveler, for whom “planning ahead” means booking twelve days in advance instead of twelve months.

Most of the populace has a job that exists entirely within a laptop, which makes this restlessness easier. The dream job is one that does not insist on a physical presence. Going to the office is a chore, and meeting a person in the flesh feels like an unnecessary, uncomfortable event. The world lives on the screen; video meetings are scheduled just so bosses can verify their employees are human and not sophisticated bots. The railway bears the brunt of this.

The Weekend ritual

And the weekends. Oh, the glorious, chaotic, bumper-to-bumper weekends. Hill stations that were once the quiet retreats of poets and pensioners now host traffic jams that begin thirty kilometers before the town does. Coorg smells of mountain coffee and diesel exhaust in equal measure. Pondicherry’s French Quarter is, on any given Saturday, roughly seventy percent people trying to take the exact same photograph of the exact same yellow wall. Manali looks like a particularly adventurous suburb of Bengaluru.

This is fine.This is progress.This is living as it is defined these days.

The weekend has birthed a specific mode of madness: people driving to “getaways,” as the travel websites call them. The 100-to-150-kilometer range is the sweet spot. The journey begins at 4 AM because someone read a blog post about “beating the traffic.” It does not beat the traffic. It simply finds the traffic waiting, caffeinated and alert, at the highway toll booth.

We have powerful cars, roads not built for them, and drivers with a purely tribal understanding of lane discipline. Every inch of the asphalt is an invitation for a pile-up.

The New Road Warriors

A new breed has also claimed the roads: the Bikers. In the old days of sanity, they were a rare species. Now, they are a plague of high-performance machinery. These riders are draped in “standard kit” that makes them look like Grand Prix champions who accidentally took a wrong turn at Buddh Grand Prix circuit and ended up on the Agra express highway.

They possess the best bikes money can buy and a total lack of interest in speed limits. Someone, somewhere, convinced them that failing to change lanes every fifty meters on a high-speed highway is a punishable offense. They weave through traffic with the frantic energy of a puppy on an espresso dose.

Somehow, many of them survive. God exists, I suppose.

The Influence of Influence

Then there are the Influencers—the new missionaries of the “Hidden Gem.” They descend upon unsuspecting villages with the gusto of a gold rush. Their primary job is to find a “secret” nook, occupy it for three hours to get the lighting right, and then broadcast it to the masses until the spot is neither secret nor a gem. They travel not to see, but to be seen seeing. If a waterfall falls and no one is there to get a filtered photograph of it, did it even happen?

Retirees, not to be left behind, are now doing “Senior Citizen Group Tours” to destinations their children couldn’t afford a decade ago. Even the joint families are out in force, descending on Tirupati or Vaishno Devi with a logistical intensity usually reserved for office parties or military exercises.

In the middle of all this, the humble neighborhood—the lane outside one’s house, the nearby park, the old Irani café—waits patiently, wondering what it did wrong. The answer, apparently, is that it cannot be hashtagged with a mountain in the background.

“If you were home last weekend, you were probably sick, or not alive?”

There is something quietly magnificent about it, of course. A country that once moved out of necessity—pilgrimage, work, displacement—is now moving out of sheer, irrepressible desire. To see things. To eat things. To be elsewhere, briefly, and return “changed” or “recharged.” To notch up a few Instagram reels, a thousand photographs that will never be revisited, and a blur of memories of the places they whizzed past.

The airports are full, the trains are packed, and the hill roads are jammed because, for the first time in a long time, people can. And so they do. Loudly, cheerfully, always slightly behind schedule, and never, ever with enough battery on their power banks. They are never tired and nothing can stop this juggernaut.

So here we are. Restless, roaming, relentlessly moving. The average Indian traveler today is not wandering; they are asserting. And if the queue at the check-in counter stretches all the way back to the parking lot—well, that’s just the price of being alive in the most enthusiastically mobile country on earth.

If you can find fun in the madness then you are well and truly alive.

But if you wanted peace, slow lane traffic and silent views of the Himalayas you might have to time travel back by about 40 years. Give it a go.

After all this frenzy, whether we as a nation actually get “anywhere” is a question for another day.

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