After having dinner with a couple of friends this weekend, we went over to have a paan (betel leaf preparation). A casual conversation with the store owner bought about a new perspective!

We were standing and discussing about our hometown(s) when the store owner intervened in the conversation and asked us where we were from. That led us to ask him the same question, to which he answered Allahabad. We casually joked with him about the city, stating that it is where Amitabh Bachhan comes from and he must be happy to be from the same city. He confidently replied, “it is not I who is from the place that Amitabh comes from, it is he who comes from my place”!

His confidence was exemplary. Without a trace of hesitation he put across his point of view very simply but assertively. He reasoned that he considers Allahabad as his city, as he grew up there. And whosoever is from there, irrespective of the stature of the person, he considers them from his city and not vice versa.

On my way back, I recalled one such incident that happend with me. During the introduction round of my post-graduate batch, I had mentioned that I was from a town called Khandwa, which is famous as the place from where Kishore Kumar came from. A senior professor later retorted and asked me about why did I feel the need to qualify my hometown as such. I was not sure what led me to making that statement and relation then.

But as I reflected today, I realised it may have been because I wasn’t confident enough at that time about where I came from. Perhaps, looking at others who came from the big cities, I was intimidated. Or perhaps, I felt the need to qualify my statement to help others relate something to my place of origin and recall it later as easily as they would have remembered other places.

It was only later that I became comfortable in my own skin, irrespective of anyone’s presence or background; and confident enough to know that I can stand on my own in any kind of a setting. To see that level of confidence in the store owner today, was a refreshing feeling.

As that conversation played in my mind again and again on the way back home, I felt that this extends to not only something as basic as our place of origin or what is our background but to all facets of our lives. We always try and relate ourselves with people, things, events, etc. In a lot of those cases, we belittle ourselves by choosing to associate ourselves with others just to fit in or to make ourselves relatable. We forget that there is an individual identity we own that makes us unique. That uniqueness defines who we are, with each of us standing out in a crowd, rather than looking all the same.

I believe, the ones who understand this fact faster in life, have an easier existence than those who take time to come to terms with it. Accepting one’s uniqueness frees us from the encumberances of the society and allows us to freely express ourselves. It also leads us on a path where we are not at odds in different settings, helping us to give our best to whatever we are doing. And lets us be.

Hopefully our young ones, who are much more confident in their skin on almost all things, would reverse this trend. After all, individual identity is what we all strive for and what they ought to discover sooner than later…