Chetan Bhagat has good reason to be unhappy with influencers
Chetan Bhagat, India’s original influencer, is unhappy with influencers. Or so he wrote in a recent column in The Times of India, where he suggested that influencers have sucked the joy out of travel and hospitality, one reel at a time. This after having seen a reel made by a “reasonably popular food influencer" about this quaint little café at a small distance from where he lives.
He and his wife decided to visit the cafe, only to find a 30-minute waiting period, a crowd spilling onto the streets and the restaurant struggling to meet orders. It seems Bhagat wasn’t the only one who saw the reel. This isn’t an isolated example—for the lack of a better phrase—of online influencing gone wrong.
Recently, the Railway Protection Force had to stop many tourists walking on rail tracks near Dudhsagar falls in Goa. The falls were a reasonably well-kept secret in Goa and weren’t exactly burgeoning with tourists even during tourist season. But travel influencers revealed this beautiful place to the world at large and things changed.
During the rainy season, over weekends, hundreds of people land up at the many forts that line the Konkan coast of Maharashtra. These forts were popular with trekkers, but influencers have put them on the tourist map, and now they attract so many people on weekends that there is literally no place to move. Clearly, there is a problem.
An obvious reason for this lies in the fact that many zoomers and millennials find meaning in their lives through travel. Influencers want to cash in on this. But the trouble is that they go to a place and make a reel over a week day.
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