To travel without a visa to a country where you once needed it feels awkward and strange. That was how I felt last week in the UK. After years of applications, document translations, paid document uploading, expensive trips to Berlin to just do biometrics (I live in Germany), the hoop jumping now feels like a deflated façade.
Generally, northern and western countries, since colonial times, had impressed and mesmerised with promises of a better and more superior life. This has contributed to the amplified desire for arranged marriages, overnight accents, birthed the infamous ‘backtrack runnings’, idealised birth and pregnancy travel and caused rifts in families over the rights of superiority dependent on what the passport looks like.
