Trekker Aniruddha Patil's latest video from the Saras Gadh near Mumbai in Maharashtra
One of the most heartwarming consequences of the opening up of the Indian economy over the last 30 years and a subsequent rise in dispensable incomes among the millennials and zoomers (Gen Z) is how widely many of them travel around the country. In the last decade or so, quite clearly there has been a dramatic increase in the availability of travel and trekking gear because of the opening up of the economy.
I do occasionally watch some of the travel and trekking shows, especially by zoomers. One of them is Aniruddha Patil who produces some remarkable visual chronicles of trekking sites in Maharashtra, especially those around various forts atop the state's many basalt hills. It is particularly interesting how youngsters such as Aniruddha are so adept at deploying a combination of technologies to create fairly slick videos of their various trekking adventures. One of the technologies is drones whose cheap availability in India in the last five to ten years has made it so easy to produce aerial shots which were unheard of until recently. For a long time aerial shots were the sole domain of hugely-budgeted film crews. Not so any more.
It is amazing how skilled this generation is at effortlessly using these technologies and how much they have become intrinsic to their lives. Another perhaps unintended consequence is how hands-on and handy many of these young travelers and trekkers have become at fixing their gear. These may not may be seminal changes in a society but in the long-run they improve the country's prospects of keeping up with the ever-changing technological landscape.
The narration that these trekkers offer may vary quite a bit in their quality in terms of the language and sweep of information but for most of who watch such videos the voice is secondary to the visual. At this rate, India will end up become most visually chronicled in its history which is always welcome.