I return after a year!
With the sudden amount of mind space I've freed up recently. I've wondered what I could do with my newfound free time. Learning French, Photoshop or Kickboxing were always the recent options. But for becoming a flip-kicking martial arts master, I would need to get in shape first. Whatever will I do...
I recently traveled to Cologne and Bonn city in Germany. This would be my first trip abroad. So yes, my international travel virginity has finally been lost at the tender age of 25. I would have expected my 1st foreign trip to be very exciting, but there was none. The four visits to the German consulate were enough to kill my enthusiasm. The (Indian) consul people really treat visa-seekers like trash. Are they Indian government officials in disguise meant to make us feel bad for leaving the country? Or are they just plain frustrated with their job? They rudely send you back, for even the slightest discrepancy. No quarter. So finally the frustrated folk gave us a 6-day visa to Germany - yipee? I think not...
Germany is a very beautiful place, (probably like every developed country). The streets and air is clean. The citizens have a good civic sense, no pot-holed roads, the advertising is very modest and constrained, there are no ugly political party banners 'welcoming' you to their turf and I hear corruption isn't a part of daily life there either. In my weeklong stay there I debated with myself whether I should make plans for working and living in a developed country. Surely they have none of the aforementioned crap that irritates me on a daily basis.
Alas the counter-argument shows up "Anywhere else, I would be an outsider". But should I be bound by such thoughts? As an individual shouldn't I be able to choose a place for myself to live? Why should I limit myself by man-made notions such as nationality? Of course, if I were to consult the ultimate truth of man's existence on Earth, such a debate would become a non-issue. We don't even know why we've been put on this planet in the first place. So why should we assert that only Point A on planet Earth is meant for us and none others?
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2 comments:
Hi, great read indeed! You have joined a group blog called the writeratti, administered by me and two other frds, Neha Arora and Pankaj Taneja. Since you haven't put any details about you and we can't see your e-mail id either, could you tell us what your name is, so that we can identify you... Anamika
Nice post. I would never settle outside of India because of the exact reason you mention - people like me around.
But rather than stemming from Nationalism, it is more because of the adaptability factor. Some people are high on "uncertainty avoidance" and some low. People with low uncertainty avoidance can comfortably adapt to most situations.
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