Oscar Wilde once famously wrote that we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. I've used the line a few times when an insult with a smattering of intellect has been required, to good effect.
I have always interpreted it to mean that while we wallow collectively in our human inadequacies and most fail to conquer them, a determined few will at least aspire to.
But what I have discovered recently is that one man's gutter is another man's path to paradise and the one which we are inadvertently born in might have so much smog above it you couldn't see the stars even if you wanted to.
Two things overwhelmed me as I walked out of the international terminal in Auckland late on Wednesday night; the roaring silence, so free of horns and noisy humanity that it seemed as though my life had been put on mute, and the clean streets that looked as if they had been newly minted for a movie set. Verges and roundabouts that in India would have housed entire families were instead lined with neatly clipped hedges and lush green grass.
The gutters to which I had paid scant regard three weeks earlier, now seemed so sparkling and polished-looking that I could hardly manage to look at anything else.
