A TOAST TO TBILISI
Our guide’s name was a bit of a tongue twister. Given the inadvertently creative ways we were mispronouncing it, he decided to make it easy for us. “Call me Chiku,” he said, volunteering his family nickname. This May, a fellow Indian journalist and I ended up in the Georgian capital as guests of the Tbilisi Art Fair (tbilisiartfair.art), held in the eclectic Caucasian city billed as being at the “historical crossroads where East meets West.” Chiku was entrusted with the difficult, but, I suppose, exciting, task of showing two news-hounds around. To his credit, he managed to floor my hard-to-please colleague, an incurable globetrotter who had visited at least 70 countries and hoped to strike a century soon. We all had hit it off well when Chiku suddenly announced, “I am young, but I have five years of driving experience. So, you are safe.” Spend a few days in Georgia, and you will know there’s an amiable Chiku in every Georgian.
Embraced by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey on one side, and superpower Russia on the other, Georgia is the most tourist-friendly of all Caucasian countries. We were in the
