I went to India in March for the Association for Tropical Biology Conservation-Asian Chapter Conference. It was great, met some fellow PhDs working in the Asian tropics and had a blast, and of course learned a lot of about what was happening in the region.
We were in Marmallapuram, about one hour south of Chennai (Madras). It was a small tourist town with some very old rock temples (World Heritage) at its centre. It was an interesting place since its main income earner was tourism, both foreign and local, together with some fishing. So all along the hotel area there were tourist shops selling all kinds of things, but almost every shop was owned by a Kashmiri or Nepalese and their goods were from those areas. There were beautiful pashminas, carpets, handloom goods, but these were things i could buy for almost the same price in Sri Lanka. Still it was fun talking to the shopkeepers (most of whom couldn't speak tamil even), about the heat in Tamil Nadu and the vagaries of the tourist trade.
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