S. K. Bose
Professor (Dr) S.K. Bose, Professor at School of Law, Manav Rachna University, India
Publications
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Opinion Article
When Celebration Becomes Currency: Festivals and the Future of Tourism in South Asia
Author(s): S. K. Bose* and Deepak Bansal
Gone are the days when festivals in South Asia belonged exclusively to the string of faith, folklore and familial intimacy. Those festivals were not designed for spectacle, nor calibrated for consumption. They were lived, not staged; inherited, not marketed. A grandmother lighting oil lamps on the threshold of her home during Diwali was not performing for an audience. A fisherman in coastal Sri Lanka offering flowers at a Buddhist shrine during Vesak was not curating an experience for foreign visitors. These were private acts of devotion, woven so deeply into the fabric of daily life that separating them from the people who practised them would have been unthinkable. Today, however, as the global tourism industry increasingly pivots toward what scholars call the ‘experience economy,’ these very festivals have been thrust into a new role-that of economic engines, cultural a.. Read More»

