Recently, a tweet on X based on a 1979 newspaper classified ad that congratulated an Indian travelling abroad went viral. The entrepreneur had embarked on a business trip to the United Kingdom, West Germany and Switzerland, among other European destinations.
It wasn’t uncommon in the decades before economic liberalisation to spot such ads in the broadsheets of that era—with a passport-size photo of the eager tripper in his or her full sartorial splendour. After all, it wasn’t every other day that Indians could travel abroad. Only the superrich (mostly inheritors of old money), top ministers and bureaucrats and those in the euphemistically dubbed ‘import-export business’ (read…
