Travel shows on the telly, especially the internationally charted, slickly produced content kind, is something I tend to avoid watching, simply because it leaves one feeling crummy for not having yet seen these spectacular sights and sounds in far-flung corners of the globe. But there are times when they shine a light on informative developments that offer fresh perspective and help contextualise things with a world-view lens. More importantly, it reminds us of how much we lag behind, if we are to call ourselves as a ‘world city’.

Case in point was a recent capsule where Ade Adepitan, the wheel-chair bound host of the BBC’s The Travel Show, took viewers on a virtual trip to Athens’s Acropolis, to the site of the historic Parthenon. He sighed about how it was one of the places on his bucket list that were off-bounds for tourists like him as it could be reached only after climbing countless steps. Putting good use to the time when most tourist destinations across the world had been shut to visitors owing to the pandemic, the keepers of this Greek treasure built a massive lift along one side of the foundations in a seamless grid-like plan that would enable people like Adepitan to reach all the way to the top of this elevated UNESCO World Heritage Site. Elated to learn of this development, he made the trip to check it out in April this year. As the camera followed him negotiating the site and soaking in its historic relevance, he humoured us with comments like now he too could explore the place just like the “two-legged kinds.”