What about London!

And when it comes to drawing comparisons between my home culture and London, it’s amazing how similar both the mores are. As a young student, what inspires me about London is that I feel that I’m in an Indian city; vibrant and dynamic, with a lively atmosphere, impulsive weather and a sociable milieu. I’ve seen that a lot of people from various nationalities reach here and find that it to be their city because it’s so multi-ethnic, multicultural. There are many worlds in this one city and my experience of living in London is helping me greatly to broaden my horizons and explore the vastness of the place in terms of its mixed culture and beautiful built. 

Don’t just exist, live. But how?

As pleasing and goose-bumps giving as it sounds, let’s face it, we don’t really want to hear it anymore. I mean you’re just sitting there in your spot, brain dead from a tiring Thursday, lifelessly racing your thumb across your touch screen on Facebook/Instagram and half-heartedly ‘liking’ those pictures from a serene European holiday of your pretty friend with a perfect life (which doesn’t help much), and then you come across something saying ‘Don’t exist, live’, which at that point really translates as ‘Yeah, right’.

So what’s keeping us from “living”? I guess the idea of unending conditionality can be part reason; it’s effectively the easiest trap that keeps us from the present. We’re imperfect humans, and we can’t help but place conditions on each step forward and we let our whole lives depend on it. Before one set of emotions sink in, we’re already thinking about what next. We lose ourselves in a maddening rat race, where everyone’s fighting their own battles, running towards an unseen finish line which maybe the norm but does it let you live?

It doesn’t have to be melodramatic. All it takes is little gestures, perhaps; nurturing something that really indulges you (even if that means reading up on African tribes), valuing people who work in sync with you, who make life easier for you, be it giving a chocolate to the watchman who’s been staying up for you all night, or simply giving a lift to someone headed in your direction. None of this takes you away from the race, probably just makes the struggle worth it.

But there’s more to living. Deciding against a stroll in the park nearby, thinking it’s no big deal because it’s not like it’d be as good as one on the white sandy beaches of California, isn’t quite the way to live. The world sure as hell is a great treat to travel around but wanting to do that should be no reason to disregard and let go of the smaller yet similar forms of pleasure.

Fact is that we’re over-exposed to fancy worldly cuisines and glamorous destinations in islands we can’t geographically locate, drool-worthy apparels and accessories that represent impossibly perfect appearances, cosmetics that apparently work as magic wands, and almost everything that we’re chasing after, because why not? It’s absolutely normal and human to dream and want the perfect and ideal life, but does that really need to be the only criteria for self contentment? Like everything else, can’t we multi-handle dreaming and working towards the ‘perfect’ life along with living what we can for now? It’s amazing to dream of waking up in a beach resort, or riding a hot air balloon in Turkey, as long as we don’t let our dreams de-glamourise our present.

We cannot forget that we’ve happily sailed and grown through a time when we were a li’l less tech-savvy, when a hashtag meant nothing more than a useless button on our Nokia phones, when street food seemed as heavenly as a Michelin-star dish would, and when we actually spent more time with our friends in person than on group chats. Maybe because with less, we live more.