Borders, Beliefs, and the Beautiful Ordinary

Campo Grande. Bangalore. Cleebourg. One cloudless Monday, three windows lit up on a screen: Ismar (64) in Brazil, Ritesh (29) in India, and the Mayor hosting from a rain-polished corner of eastern France. What followed felt less like a meeting and more like a long lunch with smart friends—curious, candid, and wonderfully human. The topic on the table: global perspectives—how geography, generation, and experience shape the way we see the world.

The room without walls

The Mayor opens with a deceptively simple prompt: If you could live anywhere for one year, where would you go—and why? It’s a question that quietly measures our priorities. Is the goal fluency, freedom, familiarity, or the thrill of not-knowing?

Ismar splits his answer in two: for English, he’d choose Canada, a place he’s visited and trusts; for learning about the world, he’d choose China—not for its futurist skylines but for its ancientness. Egypt, India, Japan, the Middle East: he speaks of old civilizations as if touching stones still warm from the sun. He would try Mandarin (or Cantonese, depending on where he lands), visit temples, walk the Great Wall—and test himself against the small shocks of daily life, like food that seems “weird” to him or spice that sets a quiet mouth on fire. “I don’t like spicy food,” he laughs, equal parts confession and challenge.

The Mayor nods: the Chinese restaurant abroad isn’t the same as the kitchen in Beijing. We often know cultures through their exports—pared down, sweetened up. Real places are stranger and more particular. That’s part of the point.

Takeaway — What can I take from this?
When you imagine a place, are you craving its postcard or its texture—its corners, its untranslatable moments, its everyday weather on your skin?

What distance teaches

Europe enters the conversation as a kind of practice ground for perspective. To the Mayor, borders are daily, tangible, and negotiable. “I can do my shopping in Germany and be back in France before the bread cools,” he jokes. Zurich is three hours away; Italy is a short flight. In the European Union, proximity becomes pedagogy: you feel the way language shifts every few kilometres; you notice how the same sky looks a shade different over another alphabet.

For Brazil and India, the scale changes. Distance is not just miles; it’s money, time, and logistics. Brazil is continental; India, a subcontinent of subcultures. Travel is costly in all the visible ways and in the invisible ones: bureaucracy, exchange rates, lost hours between cities. The luxury of “one year anywhere” isn’t evenly distributed. That, too, is perspective.

Then comes a curveball: the Mayor volunteers North Korea as his one-year choice—not to endorse oppression, but to experience the absence of freedom and observe how people nurture happiness under pressure. It’s a provocative proposal: What would it mean to live as if every sentence had edges? Would gratitude get stronger? Would joy go underground and glow brighter?

Takeaway — What can I take from this?
Where is your “learning edge”? Perhaps it’s not the place you adore, but the one that unsettles you just enough to stretch your compassion.

Japan’s discipline, Germany’s engineering, India’s argument for contact

Ritesh answers with two countries: Japan and Germany. Japan, for its discipline—the choreography of streets, trains, and shared life. Germany, for the dignity of engineering and the sense that systems can be designed to respect people. He admires Germany’s education model and the quality of public treatment. Past shadows are acknowledged, he says, but present virtues still matter. His voice is practical and idealistic at once: a builder’s gaze looking for places where order serves humanity.

On China, he is nuanced. He notes its staggering progress, especially in the past 25 years—an ascent often flattened or misunderstood in Western media. But he is wary of environments that restrict dissent. “People like us,” he says gently, meaning democratic citizens, will always feel friction where free argument is a risk. He names Russia in the same breath—fascinated by its literature and science, cautious about liberty. He knows peers who study in Russia and thrive; still, he recognizes that systems write on us, even when we’re not looking.

Then he looks homeward. India is 22 official languages and “thousands” of dialects; a place so plural you can tell north from south by the cut of a shirt. Elections last weeks, staged like a national conversation you enter in shifts. Festivals ripple across the calendar—Diwali’s light, Holi’s colour, Chhath’s prayer to the sun. “India survived because of its diversity,” Ritesh says, “not its uniformity.” He wants more exchange programs, more collisions of thought, more chances to meet “the others” who become friends.

He shares an old story: in ancient India, war ended at sunset, and surrender meant mercy. Beautiful principles—until opponents arrived with different rules, and the mismatch proved fatal. Culture is not only flavour; it’s operating system. If you never compare notes, you only learn your own bugs.

Takeaway — What can I take from this?
Cross-cultural contact is not a hobby; it’s a safety feature. It prevents our best ideas from becoming our only ideas.

Comparison as a tool, curiosity as a virtue

Ismar is honest about his motivations. “Some people don’t like comparisons,” he says. “I think comparison is a great tool.” He wants Europeans to visit Latin America to see poverty without filters, and Latin Americans to visit Europe to see systems that work differently—not to crown a winner, but to realize that both truth and dignity wear many outfits.

He also articulates a quiet doubt: What will I do with the knowledge I gather? If learning stays inert, he argues, it loses value. Curiosity is necessary but not sufficient; in his sixties, he weighs the so what as carefully as the what.

The Mayor’s question shifts to the intergenerational: what could Ismar learn from Ritesh? Technology, for one. Ritesh grins—“anyone can learn what they want”—and observes how even his mother learned to use a smartphone in five years. Tools can be demystified when someone holds the flashlight at the right angle. The pair have different timelines and different comfort zones. That’s not a barrier; it’s a blessing.

Takeaway — What can I take from this?
Knowledge that doesn’t “do” anything today often seeds tomorrow. Keep the question—And then what?—but don’t let it choke the first step.

The texture of the ordinary — Festivals, symbols, and meanings that move

The conversation meanders, as good ones should, into the everyday: a product release at work; a Diwali puja at home; a floral design on the floor whose swastika symbol (in India, a sacred emblem) can’t be casually shared in Europe, where the same sign is legally restricted. Meaning travels with people—and sometimes crashes into the customs of another place. The group navigates the moment with care, choosing context over judgment, explanation over impulse.

“Tomorrow is Chhath Puja,” the Mayor notes from his global calendar. Ritesh explains how people in his native state pray to the sun; later comes Guru Nanak Jayanti for the Sikh community. In a week there’s something new. Diversity isn’t a slogan; it’s a schedule.

Takeaway — What can I take from this?
If you want to understand a culture, look at its calendar. What does it honor, and when? When does it rest?

The invitation to make your world wider

By the end, the call is gentle but unmistakable: go meet more of the world, not to collect stamps, but to soften the corners of your mind. The Mayor often returns to a favorite metaphor about seasons—we can’t control the weather, but we can create our own summer. Even in November, even in an ordinary week lit by a webcam’s cool rectangle, people in three cities stretched their season toward warmth.

What is your season right now? Is it preparation, harvest, or healing? What country might teach you the habit you lack: precision, patience, courage, or ease? And what could you offer back—hospitality, humor, a listening ear?

The point is not to agree. The point is to compare with compassion, to let other people’s truths rearrange your furniture just enough that the light falls differently. In a world that mistakes speed for wisdom, a conversation like this is a quiet rebellion. You close the window. You keep thinking.

A quiet nudge as you go: Pick a country—near or far—that nudges a habit you want to grow. Make a one-year plan or a one-day experiment: a book from there, a recipe, a friendship begun. Your season will change when your circle does. And the circle is a call away.