London to Edinburgh would be a straightforward trip for most, but for me, it’s been more existential than logistical. Between winding cobblestone streets and the pages of borrowed books, these last two days have been a journey within a journey. While my sister and niece traipsed off to Alnwick Castle, revelling in sword fights and cinematic trivia about Harry Potter, I stumbled into smaller havens—the kind that smell of aging pages, tea steam, and a quietly ticking clock. There’s an intimacy to such places, as if time itself decided to take a coffee break. It suited me perfectly.
My highlight wasn’t Hogwarts-ish castles or portraits staring down at you with their judgmental smirks. Instead, salvation came in the form of thoughts printed on aged paper and ideas whispering from book spines. In one small Edinburgh bookshop, I picked up Felix Marquardt’s “The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place”. With dishevelled focus (and burnt-tea enthusiasm), I turned its pages, my head already in its own swirl of heritage and movement. My father’s ancestral Maharashtrian roots tangled in the soil of Karnataka, my mother tracing hers through Manipal and Udipi—and here I was, born in Bangalore, studied in Mumbai, and working in Hyderbad turning into some cosmopolitan hybrid who speaks more English than Marathi or Kannada combined. Am I a nomad? A wayfarer? A well-dressed migrant masquerading as a "global citizen"?
Marquardt rejects the stale idea of migration as a “crisis.” Instead, he flips it entirely: movement, he says, is life’s great enabler. Mobility sparks innovation and survival. Borders, he argues, are just lines on a map that can’t contain progress. In his pages, migration isn’t rebellion against society—it’s the glue that binds cross-cultural lives, the driver of change, the link between past and future. He sees migration as not just an act of escape but perhaps the most quintessential, instinctive expression of humanity. As I sat there, holding that thought, a sad hiss from the nearby tea vending machine reminded me of my own comical displacement—an Indian endlessly attempting to romance lukewarm British tea.
Then Orwell cracked through my mood like a cloudy Edinburgh day splitting open for the sun. His “Why I Write” crept into my pile of self-imposed intellectual homework. If Marquardt’s future-focused optimism felt like a refreshing breeze, Orwell’s unflinching critiques were the sobering drizzle that followed. For Orwell, England was a paradox: a land defined by its longing for the past, in love with nostalgia, unwilling to embrace the inevitability of change. “The British hate change,” he insinuated, peeling apart our collective tendency to be comforted by familiarity even as serious societal diseases—inequality, exploitation, entire empires of injustice—crawl unabated.
While I admired his brutal honesty, I couldn’t help but draw a stark contrast between Orwell and Marquardt. Orwell looked at the English through a lens of affection masked with frustration. He saw a people trapped in their own history, stuck in amber, too conflicted to be truly progressive but too haunted to stay comfortably regressive. He wrote from a tightly contained space, chronicling injustice and demanding reform. Meanwhile, Marquardt sprawls unapologetically across maps, pulling on threads of history, innovation, and identity to weave his broader thesis: humanity thrives in movement because it is movement.
It was strange to sit here in the heart of the UK—this setting both Orwellian and Marquardtian in its contradictions and interpretations—and let these two voices fight it out in my mind. The irony wasn’t lost on me: here I was, the proverbial nomad, a broken echo of my ancestors’ migrations, currently perched in a foreign land while reading about the virtues of leaving one’s homeland. Meanwhile, some of the locals around me seemed to embody Orwell’s scathing humour without even realizing it—stubbornly clinging to the past in overpriced wool coats, sipping tea like it came with a side of Churchill’s ghost.
Yet, as a lover of the present, I couldn’t entirely agree with Orwell either. Castles, museums, and centuries-old monuments never captivated me the way modern books do. The smell of musty paper and sharp, contemporary ideas excites me more than gilded frames or preserved swords ever could. It's not history that moves me—it’s the here and now, the urgent and startling truths about who we are today and what we’re running toward. In that sense, though both Orwell and Marquardt loved to poke at the grand social machine, my sympathies lean toward the latter.
I imagined Orwell and Marquardt sharing tea in some timeless café—a fraught conversation between the lover of rooted traditions and the champion of uprooted lives. Perhaps Orwell might have frowned upon Marquardt’s freewheeling optimism, deeming his vision naive. Perhaps Marquardt, with his emphasis on mobility and possibility, would’ve challenged Orwell’s innate scepticism. And I? I’d have been that awkward third party, watching, listening, and very likely spilling my tea in excitement.
By the time my family returned, brimming with anecdotes about Alnwick’s castle gardens ("Can you believe they filmed Harry Potter HERE?!"), I realized just how far my own little detour through thought had taken me. They had wandered through the ruins of medieval fantasies. I had lingered in the chaos of present-day reality, riding on the coattails of nomads and political thinkers.
Later that evening, reunited around a table laden with Indian food and a bottle of wine, my family and I let the day take another turn—deep, reflective, and spiked with laughter. I posed two deceptively simple questions: What do we love about the UK that we don’t see in India? And what do we adore about India that we’ll never find here? It turned into a lively, revealing discussion. My niece answered first, with the enthusiasm only her age can muster. “The architecture here, the space, and the way everything moves without chaos. It’s calm… like people are allowed to just take their time.” She said it like someone who’s been holding her breath in India all these years and didn’t quite realize it until she exhaled here. I nodded, thoroughly agreeing with her on the last point. There’s a strange, deliberate peace underpinning the UK—a rhythm that sharply contrasts with India’s shifting, improvisational chaos.
My sister mirrored my niece’s enthusiasm but added her own layer. Practical as ever, she pointed out the efficiency of public transport. “I like how it works,” she said. “A train’s a train, and you know it won’t disappoint. But what will I never find here? India.” Her voice softened as she said it, accompanied by a shrug that somehow doubled as a declaration of pride. “I love my country. I wouldn’t trade it.”
When it was my turn, I smiled and waxed poetic—as I always do. “India is every human sense in overdrive,” I said. “There’s no country quite like home to remind you of your own body—your five senses—every single day. The smell of food wafting around every corner, the sights of rural and urban life colliding in vibrant, chaotic colour; the taste of spice and sweet that dances on your tongue; the sheer sound of life—people, traffic, festivals, the hum and cacophony of humanity, always, always on; and finally, the touch. Of people. Of connection. Sometimes a bit too in your space for comfort, but human in a way I haven’t quite seen anywhere else. That touch is unique. It’s raw. It’s... us.”
We laughed, clinked our glasses, and debated nuances late into the evening. For all our differences, one thing felt clear—whether it’s the calm rhythm of Edinburgh or the frenetic pulse of India, there’s value in both. There’s beauty in being able to experience life on both ends of that scale and to feel at home somewhere between them.
Tomorrow, I’ll pack my thoughts into my bag alongside my books, pieces of Edinburgh following me into the next chapter. Migration might be an inevitable part of our human condition, but reflection is what gives it meaning. I’ll carry these questions with me—the identity of a modern nomad, the joy of movement, and the grounding roots of home—wherever I walk next. And maybe I’ll finally learn to drink a decent cup of tea without all the philosophical drama. Then again, probably not.
No comments:
Post a Comment