Your Holiday Is Someone's Home

We all love to travel, especially after the advent of social media, where drone shots make us believe we could stand in that exact frame ourselves. Travel has surged tremendously post-Covid — salaries have exploded for some, and for others, the influencer economy has erupted into a viable livelihood. But amidst all this fanfare, we have forgotten the essence of travelling. When we move from our home to a different place, we forget that for the people living there, that place is their home. We bask in its beauty, we savour the hospitality of their culture, we collect experiences of a lifetime — all without bothering to understand anything about the place itself. We pass sweeping judgments about every destination we visit. We reduce their entire existence to a binary: good or bad. We never pause to learn anything about how that place came to be. What we should do instead is walk its streets as much as possible, shop where the locals shop, eat where the locals eat. Even long, aimless…