(Hindustan Times, 5th July 2026)
I’m writing this from Bellagio, a town on the shores of Lake Como, Italy. And it somehow reminds me of my home in Uttar Pradesh, a home which exists only in old family albums & the collective memories of our nuclear family. If you stayed on rent during your childhood, you would relate. Such people always struggle with the concept of ‘home’.
The street I am staying in Bellagio, is actually an alleyway, like a gully in our mohalla back in UP. It has a fancy name here, Salita Serbelloni. The word Salita means to ‘Climb’ as it has stairs, pretty basic, but these are names Gurgaon real estate developers borrow to sell your more expensive apartments in Wazirabad. (Funnily our addresses tell you about our complex history, It may have a mention of a Mughal General, a European colonizer, and a Mahabharata character)
This narrow alleyway snakes through 18th century pastel houses, artisanal boutiques, and cafes, and its unique stones are known to be very fertile for farming Instagram impressions. Luckily there are enough stairs to deter the casual tourists with three trolley bags. Hence I didn’t have much trouble booking this apartment here. It’s like old Banaras, with better garbage collection. Everything else is very similar. As I write this, the laughter of old Italian aunties on the stairway is pouring into my window, which overlooks another window. Someone is washing vegetables. Another one’s cooking pasta probably, the noises of their kitchen is syncing with mine. The cooking feels communal. The lanes are so narrow that direct sunlight shouldn’t technically exist, yet somehow a thin golden strip manages to squeeze itself between old stone buildings to land perfectly on my breakfast table.
There are 2nd world war era uncles reading newspapers on the side. Some construction work is happening intermittently. Air conditioning is a sin in Europe, hence people open their windows to be a part of the world around them.
Western tourists, who live a suburban life, the ones who figure out their neighbor passed away only 3 weeks later, love this exotic bustle. For an Indian like me, this is like home. Minus the whistle of the pressure cooker. There are stray cows on this street too, but they are primarily on the plates paired with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.
What makes a place touristy though? For me, any place which makes you feel small, becomes a tourist place. Mountains do it by simply existing. You stand in front of the Himalayas, and suddenly your pending emails seems like a minor irritant. The sea does the same. One enormous wave reminds you that your colleague scheduling emails late-night to appear hard working, is so funny. Whenever your problems appear larger than life, one craves to feel small, to be humbled, to see how insignificant your problems are. How insignificant you are.
Temples and religious places make us feel small because they are built around something infinitely larger than ourselves. Whether you’re religious or not, standing under a thousand-year-old temple ceiling has a peculiar effect. You instinctively lower your voice. Nobody tells you to. Your ego does it on its own. Historical monuments achieve the same thing differently. Imagine standing before the Colosseum, the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal. They’ve watched empires rise and disappear. Mighty kings who conquered continents, who no-one could defeat, were eventually buried around these structures. The monuments stood there to see it all. They are good enough to humble an Asst Vice President manning the compliance department of a bank.
They become tourist destinations because they quietly rearrange your perspective. They remind you that the universe has never centred itself around your Monday morning meeting. We spend most of our lives trying to become important. Bigger salary. Bigger title. Bigger house. A bigger follower count.
Then, exhausted from becoming big, we spend our holidays searching for places that make us feel wonderfully small again. Suddenly minor differences of salaries, or designations or startup valuations of yours and your contemporaries feel insignificant from 10,000 feet.
Whenever our problems begin appearing larger than life, what we really need isn’t a bigger solution.
We need a bigger backdrop. Stand before a mountain and your anxiety shrinks. Watch an endless lake and your deadlines become less dramatic.
Sit inside a centuries-old lane listening to two Italian aunties laughing over something that has absolutely nothing to do with you, and you’re reminded of a comforting truth. Life was going on before you arrived. It will continue after you leave.
The world is astonishingly indifferent to your stress. Oddly enough, that’s not depressing. It’s liberating.
Maybe that’s the real purpose of travel. Not to collect fridge magnets. Not to tick famous places off an itinerary. Not to humble-brag visiting fancy places, and looking for Indian food on the 3rd day.
Not even to take staged candid shots of you looking into the distance, that will receive exactly 43 likes before disappearing into the algorithm.
Maybe we travel because, every once in a while, we need to stand before something which tells you, “Relax. You’re much smaller than you think.”
And somehow, that’s exactly what makes life feel much bigger. Just one suggestion though, no matter how lovely they look, avoid going to forts in Pune.
