Modern Love vs Old Love: What I Learned in Pali at 2AM

My Brother Akshay Gadade Reading "Letters That Never Crossed Nainital"

Last night, walking through the streets of Pali at 2AM with my elder brother Akshay Surve, I noticed something that stayed with me long after I got home. Why was I there? Because I was creating content for my book promotion "Letters That Never Crossed Nainital" and yet, something felt off.

Not wrong. Just unfamiliar.

So, Love and Couple. They were everywhere. Sitting close, laughing loudly, dressed in a way that made them look like they belonged to the moment more than to each other. There was a certain ease in the way they held hands, a kind of confidence in the way they occupied their own space together. It looked like love, the kind that is visible, immediate, and unafraid of being seen. It's Bandra, night is always young there. But that moment made me question something deeper and that was, has the meaning of love changed, or have we changed the way we experience it?

What Modern Love Looks Like Today

A few weeks before that night, I was somewhere entirely different. Because I was in Uttarakhand.

The hills have a way of changing the pace of things, not just the air, but the way you think, the way you feel, the way you notice. Mornings didn’t arrive abruptly there. They unfolded slowly, almost as if they were careful not to disturb anything that had settled overnight. The sun took his own sweet time and the shadow hiding the road as an carpet.

Love, too, felt like that.

It wasn’t something that needed to be spoken constantly. It didn’t ask for acknowledgment every few minutes. It existed in pauses, in the way silence felt shared rather than empty.

There are stories that move quietly, like mist descending upon a hillside town, unnoticed until everything is softened by it. - From the book "Letters That Never Crossed Nainital"

And the love and stuff I witnessed yesterday was way to opposite.

When Love Was About Waiting, Not Watching

Back in the city, that sense of waiting seems to have disappeared.

Everything moves quickly here and everything has a rush. Conversations begin and end within minutes. Messages arrive instantly and if not replied in time the chance is gone, and so does the expectation to respond are all time high. Silence, which once carried meaning, now creates doubt and unfaithfulness.

We have learned to measure affection in visibility and in materialistic way.

We live in an age where communication is instantaneous… yet there was a time when love depended upon patience. - From the book "Letters That Never Crossed Nainital"

There was a time when love travelled slowly. Words were written, not typed. Feelings were understood before they were expressed. And distance, instead of weakening connection, deepened it.

Now, distance has been replaced by constant access. And yet, something feels missing.

The Difference Between Feeling and Performing Love

Standing in Bandra Pali that night, watching people live a version of love that felt so certain and so effortless, I realized something I hadn’t been able to put into words before and some other angle of love which I might have missed while running in my life.

Everyone seems to be in love.
But very few seem to be inside it.

There is a difference between experiencing something and performing it. One asks for presence. The other asks for proof.

Somewhere between being seen and being felt, love begins to lose its depth. Maybe that's evolving away from betterment and preserving that kind of old school love was the essence of my book. "Letters That Never Crossed Nainital"

We are not afraid of being alone anymore. We are afraid of missing out and that's true.

So we rush into conversations, into connections, into something we hope feels like love but it isn't or maybe it's just an attention. We try to understand everything instantly, define everything quickly, and secure something before it even has time to grow and growth takes patience be it in anything.

In doing so, we might be moving faster than our own emotions.

Why I Feel Out of Place in This Version of Love

This isn’t criticism. It’s observation.

I am not built for a version of love that needs to be constantly visible to feel real.

I find myself drawn to something quieter. Something that does not rush to define itself. Something that does not demand attention to exist.

Love did not announce itself anymore. It arrived the way routine does… without knocking.

That kind of love doesn’t ask to be seen. It simply stays.

Has Love Changed, or Have We?

Maybe love hasn’t changed.

Maybe we have and our expectation.

We’ve traded patience for speed. Depth for visibility. Waiting for instant replies. And in doing so, we may have lost the ability to sit with something that is still becoming and budding.

Not everything meaningful is immediate.

Some things take time to arrive. Some things take longer to understand.

“Sometimes, love does not perish in betrayal. Sometimes, it is lost in transit.”

And maybe that is what is happening now.

The Kind of Love I Still Believe In

Author Yash Gadade

There are still people who believe in something slower. Something that does not need to be performed to be real. Something that can exist without constant reassurance. I remember exactly what I wanted while writing my book. I wanted an old school love which exists without hurry and thats what I did.

Maybe I was too dumb to understand the new genz way of loving and I better off without knowing it.

That is the kind of love I experienced in the hills which I wrote about.

It stayed with me long after I left.

It is quiet, patient, and often unnoticed but it is real.