The Indian tourist abroad is most often a pest

Almost the first thing I noticed when I landed in Berlin was images of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. The guru was visiting for a festival of world culture. His smiling face beamed out of cylindrical street hoardings around the city. Back-to-back with him, on the other side of the hoardings I saw, was Lady Gaga. Clearly, Berliners are confronted with difficult choices.

At the hostel I was staying in, the young man at the reception was wearing a T-shirt with a Shiva image on it. A Norwegian girl who happened to be in the same room turned out to be a yoga practitioner.
And so it goes. Little bits of India are everywhere in Europe.
Indians, though, are absent from most scenes. When they do arrive anywhere, it is in a loud, cackling group that everyone else politely gives a wide berth to.
The Indian tourist is most often a pest. He or she will nearly always travel in a big contingent, will talk too loud and bargain too hard, will make a fuss about the food, stare at the women if he's a man below 60, and generally find some way to make an ass of himself.
I don't see the point of such tourism. These groups of Indians only see each other in their travels. They experience only the tourist sites with hordes of other rampaging tourists like themselves. For the rest of the time, they travel in their own Indian bubbles. It might be simpler if they just stayed home and watched the scenery on TV. And if the aim of the travel is only to click photos in front of famous landmarks, well, try Photoshop.
Travel is very different from tourism. A tourist is not a traveller.
A real traveller plans his or her own trip. He goes where he does on his own, or with a small group of friends or family.
He does not insist on eating only his own food and talking to only his own kind in the places he visits. He is open to new cultures and cuisines.
He does not visit cities and countries to check them off a list. The purpose of visiting a place cannot merely be to take a photo and go back and tell people "I was there". If you didn't learn or do anything new by going there, the trip was wasted.
Travel is undertaken to broaden the mind. It should give the traveller new perspectives and ideas. When you return from your travels, it should be with greater knowledge and understanding of the places you visited, and the people who live in those places. If you return merely with photos and souvenirs, you've only been a tourist.
In most parts of the world that are popular tourism destinations, the tourist is catered to, bowed before, and detested. Locals in Goa, for example, tend to dislike tourism. The situation is similar in other parts of the world.
The traveller, in contrast, has more real respect.
In the best cases, he is an inheritor of the tradition of travel that includes names like Fa Hien and Bodhidharma. He is, like those great travellers, an ambassador, and a student as well as a teacher.
As India and China grow more prosperous, and cheap flights reach more destinations, people from these countries will start to travel more. This has already begun. Given the size of their populations, it is reasonable to expect that large numbers of Indians and Chinese will travel in the years to come. One can only hope they travel in the spirit of the greatest travellers from their pasts.