This was Ken’s fifth consecutive annual visit to India from his native land, the United Kingdom. But unlike his previous four visits, this time he had brought Joe, his friend, along. Ken was a retired military man who enjoyed trotting the globe.

“I have had a close brush with the cultures and cuisines of almost all nations, but I am smitten with India’s rich cultural heritage,” said Ken when I was introduced to him by the principal of our college. I was assigned the lovely job of interpreter for both the guests during their stay with us. While having interactions with them in the queen’s tongue, I was not only enthusiastic but also marvelled at their profound curiosity to dig deeper into our cultural mines.

Ken’s inquisitiveness was quite inspiring, questioning me about all the famous places of Amritsar that we all visited together. A sense of deep piety overwhelmed Ken and Joe when I expounded on the glorious religious history of The Golden Temple. But the bloody well and the chest-piercing bullet marks at Jaliyah Wala Bhag welled up tears in their eyes.

They were perhaps experiencing a sort of remorse within for what their countrymen had done to our citizens when we were a colony of the British. But I was more inclined to know what tempted these foreign birds of exotic wings to fly to India over and over again.

Though Joe was just a fun-grabber wanting to have a first-hand experience of the Indian ways of life, for Ken it was his quest for spirituality that had brought him to India on several occasions. Ken had developed a close connect with some great Indian mystics also. He had come to practise esoteric oriental meditation under their tutelage. Playing a good host and offering them our cuisines and cultural bonanza brought a heightened sense of joy and pride to me.

But these feelings were short-lived. I had to hang my head in shame when my foreign friends enquired about the gruesome rape of a doctor from Hyderabad (Telengana). Here my skills in speech failed me badly.

In a bid to end my embarrassment, they deliberately changed the course of their conversation to the marvellous Indian culture again. But I was still unable to compose myself. What messages were we Indians spreading across the world? Was our country now getting transformed from a rich land of spirituality to the land of sexual perversity? I was no more able to have eye contact with my foreign guests.