Nostalgia....!

One of my favorite words and the feeling it gives is difficult to explain. There is a sweet pain, the strong desire to go back to that place in spite of the brutal awareness that it’s not possible. There is also a happiness of having been there and experienced it and looking at the place through a time span of don’t know how many years, months or days. We are greedy for some moments, and we want those again and again. Emotions – why do they need to be so complicated?

I am having nostalgia of an entire ERA! Yes, and it’s the 90s. God how I wish I could go back to those days. Just drop everything, turn back, and start running. Hurl myself over the small wall compound around my house, land on soft mud grazing my palms and knees, but not worried a bit about it. Get up and start running towards the openness. Grinning ear to ear and arms spread as if to embrace something enormous very precious. It was not a ‘thing’ actually. It was freedom – from exams, studies and school as summer vacations had started. The vacation had one prime destination – visit to grand-parents house. The amazing finger-licking dishes our grandmothers and aunts made. And the countless visits to which our grandfathers took us to. We used to come back with a cargo of stories ready to unload in front of our friends. We learned about different places from our stories and made promises to visit the other friend’s native in the next vacation. This is how our travel plans were made. We needed, authorization from mothers, commute from our fathers and accommodation with a family. Those travels were the best travels till now.

That kind of pure joy is rare now-a-days. The feeling of seeing/experiencing something for the first time is gone. Thanks to the internet and social media. I have seen my dream destinations before even planning the travels. When I visit those places, the thrill of seeing something new is lost. How I wish to experience that thrill again!

It’s the month of May, the month of vacations in my country. Sitting on my sofa, am browsing through Zomato to plan for dinner. Later I will browse through Google and search for places to visit for a mini vacation. Thanks to my job, my vacation days are max 4 days together. Obviously, I will choose the destination based on the best images on the internet and then go and visit that place to see the same pics in actual.

I wish to go back and see the unknown. I wish to become the innocent kid and find happiness in small things. I wish to now have a big wish list and to be able to find joy in small things. I wish to go back!