Evolving

I moved away from home, to a foreign city when I was only 15 years old. I stayed there till I was abruptly and hurriedly uprooted from there by the Covid 19 pandemic. In my 6 years in this city, I was constantly told about how the place has lost its charm. As one among an imposing mass of migrant students, I was also often reminded about how we were unwelcome and how it was our presence that was the cause of the cultural dilution. How we made the space less authentic.

But who decides what is authentic? Who decides what acceptable history is and when it last dates back to?

Why have we collectively come to shun acknowledging our present as tomorrow's history? Instead, we ache and naively hold on to an exoticised past that is so far removed from our contexts that it only exists as a foreign, contrived dream.

We often talk about how terrible everything about our present is- the vehicular traffic, the debilitating effects of social media, the uncontrolled development of tech, the dilution of cultures, the corruption of identities and so much more. We seem to neglect the fact that perhaps this evolution is in fact our new culture. And there is beauty in all plurality