Hiking in Kerala - Better than Sri Lanka??? ����

This is real: Dour Scotsman confronts Subcontinental Sleazeball. And becomes outright explicitly, verbally racist, with contemptuously violent implication. Wow. You can read the last four hundred years of Anglo/Indian history in this traveller's tale of a quick young Scotsman rebuffing and containing his lazy, presumptuous Indian guide. It is painful. I can't say as I like our young Scotsman: He is ageist, and ableist, and cold, and, as I say, racist to a fault, with no room in his heart for the childish moral and intellectual weaknesses of others--but I am compelled to admire him, and to admit the justness of his judgement, which he will not unsay. And but notice how endearingly this Caledonian luxuriates in the upland cool and mountain mists of Kerala, as people of his race have always done. Certainly I don't quite like him, but I think I rather love him.

Notice, too, the instinctual correctness with which our young adventurer, as of one whose heritage speaks through him, identifies and describes the purpose of an elephant watering tank on the summit of a Western Ghat. That is authenticity.