India, July 5 -- I am writing this from Bellagio, a town on the shores of Lake Como in Italy. It somehow reminds me of my home in Uttar Pradesh - a home which exists only in old family albums and the collective memories of our nuclear family. If you stayed on rent during your childhood, you might relate. Such people always struggle with the concept of "home". The alley on which my current quarters are - Salita Serbelloni - is quite like one of the gullies in our mohalla back in UP. "Salita" is Italian for "climb" - pretty basic. But, Gurgaon real estate developers will borrow such words to sell you expensive apartments in Wazirabad. Funnily, addresses in India tell you about our complex history, with our cities, streets, and lanes sometimes named after a Mughal general or an European coloniser or a Mahabharata character. Salita Serbelloni snakes through pastel, 18th-century houses, artisanal boutiques, and cafes; its unique stones are known to be very fertile for farming Instagram impressions. Luckily, there are enough stairs to deter casual tourists with three trolley bags. Hence, I didn't have much trouble booking an apartment here. It's like old Banaras, but with better garbage collection. Everything else is very similar. The laughter of elderly Italian women on the stairway streams through my window overlooking, well, another window. Someone is washing vegetables. The noises of another's kitchen syncs with mine. The cooking feels communal. The lanes are so narrow that sunlight shouldn't be able to hit them; yet, somehow a thin, golden strip pries through the old stone buildings and lights up my breakfast table. There are ancient-looking uncles lost behind newspapers on the side of the alley. Some construction work is happening intermittently. Air conditioning is a sin in Europe; hence, people open their windows to be a part of the world around them. Western tourists, whose suburban lives prevents them from knowing that their neighbour passed away until three weeks later, love this "exotic" hustle-bustle. An Indian like me sees snatches of home - minus the pressure-cooker whistles. There are cows on this street too, but they are primarily on serving plates, paired with some fine wine. What makes a place "touristy"? For me, any place that makes you feel small becomes a tourist place. Gazing at the Himalayas, your pending e-mails seems like a minor irritant. An enormous wave rising as you stand on the beach makes your colleague scheduling e-mails for dispatch late in the night to appear hard-working appears funny instead. Whenever your problems appear larger than life, you crave to be humbled, to be shown how insignificant your problems are. Temples and religious places are built around something infinitely larger than ourselves. Whether you are religious or not, the visage of a 1,000-year-old shikhara (temple crest) has a peculiar effect. Inside the temple's sanctum, you instinctively lower your voice. Historical monuments achieve the same thing, differently. The Colosseum, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal - they have all watched empires rise and fall. Mighty kings who conquered continents were eventually interred at such places. The monuments stood there and saw it all. They can make an assistant vice president leading compliance at a bank feel insignificant.These places become tourist destinations because they quietly rearrange your perspective. They remind you that the universe has never centred itself around your Monday morning. We spend most of our lives trying to become important. Then, exhausted from the chase, we spend our holidays searching for places that make us feel wonderfully small again. Minor differences of salary or designation or startup valuation feelinsignificant from a view 30,000 feet above the sea level. Our "big" problems don't really need "bigger" solutions. We need a bigger backdrop to view them against. Before a mountain, your anxiety shrinks. Deadline pressures disappear standing by a lake, the other shore of which you can't see. Sitting by a centuries-old lane, listening to two grey-haired Italian women laugh over something that has nothing to do with you reminds you of a comforting truth: Life was going on before you arrived; it will go on after you leave. That's perhaps why celebrities travel abroad to "feel human". The world is astonishingly indifferent to your stress. Oddly enough, that's not depressing. It is liberating. Maybe that's the real purpose of travel - not to collect fridge magnets, not to tick famous places off an itinerary, not to humble-brag your destinations, and not even to pose for staged "candid" shots of you looking into the distance, to fish for some likes before the pictures fade into oblivion. Maybe we travel because we need to stand before something that tells us, "Relax. You're much smaller than you think." And somehow, that's exactly what makes life feel much bigger....