Forcing The Strange

I have only been abroad one time in my life. I enjoyed it. I went to the USA, stayed in Riverside California, then travelled to see Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, New York, and came back home. 

In High School when I read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Mr Weasley had trouble with the Muggle money, and Harry had to help him pay the Campsite Manager, or in Order of the Phoenix, and Mr Weasley was taking Harry to the Wizengamot for his Underage Magic trial, and Harry had to marvel at how incompetent Mr Weasley was managing muggle money, I always thought JK Rowling pushed the Otherness of Magical People a little too far. This was the British pound currency notes and coins we were talking about. And they are British people, living in, to tell the truth I don’t really know but, in and around Britain.

When I was in the USA, and I had to make payments, I realized dear lord, I was wrong to be so harsh on Mr Weasley, after all. Also, JKR, I guess. You'd think – logically – it's numbers, you just read the numbers. But it turns out it's not that simple. It turned out it was familiarity that counted. I was always confused when making payments.

Back home in India, even when I don’t have a lot of money, I can easily tell the currency notes apart (even the coins, sure), because I know their colours, their sizes, their feel. Even when they whipped up a new ₹2000 note overnight, it was still easy to tell it apart from the rest. Actually, now that the new notes have been in circulation for a while, the smaller, violet of the ₹100 has become so much more familiar than the light blue of the earlier, slightly larger note. No?

This got me to thinking – what else have I become familiar with? What have I simply normalized? How can I look at the world differently? 

I have recently mused on this and have forced myself, from time to time, to look at Aizawl as someone who just got here. If I were a tourist here, or someone travelling on business, or on a class trip, or a student, what would I think of Aizawl? Would I like the scenery? Would I like the food? Would I like the people? Would I like the weekends? What would I think of the infrastructure, the distance, the local hangouts and hotspots? What would I think of Aizawl if I were here only temporary?

It’s not very easy at all, given how this is my home. But sometimes it happens. The pretense gets very real and existential. And it feels like Aizawl is different than I one I knew. There’s something in the air that shifts. And then I feel a little like how I feel when I travel to different places. Like a shift in photographs, or even in the scent as carried by the wind. 

The way everyone has their own homes, and families, and lives, and work that I will never be privy to. In Aizawl, as was in Kasauli, as was in Goa, as was in Trivandrum, as was in New Delhi, as was in Riverside, as was in Srinagar, as was in Mumbai. Life has its very own definite way of being. It is, despite you. It can make you feel very inconsequential to think of the sheer micro level of your existence, but also it can make you feel like a little atom that is part of what makes up an entire universe, being where you be, part of life, the universe, and everything. Kind of cool, to be honest.

Familiarity is comfort, and that is good. Sometimes it is also good to be unfamiliar, just so you learn empathy, to consider a world that is wholly alien to you. When the home you’ve always known feels foreign, it is weird. But it does make you think. 

I kind of like it.