Don’t get me wrong. I love travelling, at least most of the times, when it doesn’t involve forced family reunions or funerals. All the vacations that I have taken, I have thoroughly relished and experienced different cultures. Bagels in New York and Vada Pav in Mumbai, I’ve loved it all. And someday, I hope to visit New Zealand so that I can bungee jump and scream at the top of my voice (and take a million crazy pictures). But until then, as boring as it may sound, I am absolutely okay with spending a whole summer in my room reading books and scribbling in that little black notebook of mine.
I do not want a random website with tons of edited pictures telling me to go explore the world because life, my dear friend, is short. No, thank you. Life is short, yes. But it is perfectly acceptable to not have seen London or to not have gone parasailing in Mauritius. Why is almost every writing forum on the internet telling me to go take a vacation and discover the world whilst discovering myself? And if the dreadful life advice in writing isn’t enough, instagrammed photos are the cherry on the cake. A sepia-ed random village in Greece is so damn gorgeous that my life suddenly seems meaningless, I have to go there before I turn 25. Because oh dear God, it is in that list of 25 things to do before I turn 25 written by someone whom I don’t know but I’ll take advice from them, alright. I may not even have started earning but going to some country whose name I cannot even pronounce is what I should be doing if I have to feel alive. Right? No.
Grow up, folks.
Irrespective of what these so called advice vending machines tell you, there is no need to go halfway across the world every summer to feel accomplished and live your life. Curling up in your living room and reading Wodehouse the whole day or watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s on repeat is pretty damn epic. And you know all those with tinted pictures of the roads in some village somewhere that look ravishing and you wish you could just throw your life away and be there? It’s probably some place where the food is disgusting and you’ll have to walk twenty miles just to find a freaking restroom. So, it’s okay. Home really isn’t all that bad.
And of course, just like ‘they’ all say, do what you want.
