Vikram’s Viewpoint: Appreciating What You Can, While You Can

By Opinion Editor Vikram Mahajan

Over the summer, I returned to India for the first time in two years in what was one of the highlights of summer break. The vacation was a ten-day trip wedged between weeks of college research and a residential summer program; those ten days were intensely bargained for with parents, stolen away from what they insisted should have been still more productivity.

Admittedly, despite hauling along my computer and promising to put in a few hours of usefulness each day, I did next to nothing academic, instead languishing at my grandparents’ bustling farmhouse in Delhi. Yet interspersed with these drawn-out moments of domestic tranquility was an incessant buzz of activity as my grandparents, aided by my equally-zealous aunt and uncle, packed as much as they could into the itinerary of a week-and-a-half. I had to taste the mutton at the new restaurant, try on clothes both for myself and as a proxy for my brother, accompany my grandparents to pick up fruits and vegetables from their vendors, and meet long-lost relatives.

The last few days in particular were feverishly rushed. One evening a couple days before the flight back, I joined my aunt, uncle and cousins to see Qutab Minar, which to my amazement I realized I’d never actually visited before in spite of having crossed it countless times on drives from Delhi to Gurgaon. The next day featured a whirlwind tour of the rest of Delhi — my grandparents’ prior estate, where I had lived for a few months of my infancy; the alma mater of my father and grandfather; the shopping district my mother loved to frequent. These, too, were all places I’d never seen before, or seen just in passing, even though I’d lived around Delhi for close to a decade.

But perhaps that was precisely why I’d never bothered to notice them — because they were right in my backyard and easy to take for granted. Now, with just a few days in my visit and no idea of when I was to return, it was suddenly imperative to immerse myself in my homeland in what little time I had to spend in it.

This taking-for-granted still holds true. The famed Meadowlark Dairy was within walking distance of my house in Pleasanton for the four years I lived there, yet I never visited. Throughout the Bay Area, there remain many landmarks I’ve never been to. These, incidentally, are the same places that visiting family and friends insist on seeing — so perhaps I’ll never appreciate what our community has to offer until I have the vantage point of a passing visitor rather than a passive local.

There are times when I’m able to do just that. At a summer program in Stanford later in the summer, I was finally able to explore San Francisco’s famed Museum of Modern Arts, a wondrous experience that once again led me to wonder what other adventures may be concealed beneath the surface of my community.

Maybe it’s time for me, and for all of us, to appreciate the places closest to us as well as those halfway across the globe. It’s a cliche to suggest that we stop and smell the roses on the highway of life, but perhaps those in our own backyard have just the same scent.