East or west, Home is the best. Is it really?

Readers of this blog and my previous one would know that I have, many a time, talked about missing my family, my home country, and everything related to it - nothing special, just your typical expat rant. The reasons are obvious - imagine that you are in a far away land, and you miss the culture you were brought up in, the people you love and even the sense of belonging which is never complete in another place - what else would your favourite topic be? But truth remains that I am still a nomad who still doesn’t seriously consider going home for good. What is it that keeps me here, in a foreign land, despite all the obvious reasons?

When I first left home, it was a sense of adventure. Maybe, adventure is not the right word. Curiosity, perhaps. The feeling of not knowing what lies ahead. The joy of embarking on a path where the destination is not clear. To break away from everything that you once thought you would do, and carve out your own path in the world. To pluck yourself out from your comfortable surroundings and throw yourself into the world of the unknown. Do you remember the song, “Confidence” in Sound of Music, that Maria sings on her way to the abbey to the Von Trapp house for the first time? If airlines officials would let me skip and sing, perhaps I would have sang the same words too:

“What will this day be like? I wonder.
What will my future be? I wonder.
It could be so exciting to be out in the world, to be free
My heart should be wildly rejoicing..”

As I grew up past the irrational teens and became more comfortable with my place in the world, childish curiosity gave way to someting else. The sense of adventure didn’t exactly fade away, but it wasn’t curiosity and adventure that led me on. It was a sense of freedom. The freedom to be away from everything. The freedom to do what you want. The freedom to know that your actions are your concern and only yours. The ultimate sense of unaccountability, if you may. Let me not glorify it - the honest truth may be that it is just a run-away attitude. If you could empathize with Kate in Lost, when Tom tells her, “You always want to run away, Katie”, you know what I mean. After I had lived for several years, in what I call my first stop , I had reached a point in life where I couldn’t walk in the city center without meeting someone who knew someone who knew someone I knew. Somehow, the place doesn’t feel foreign anymore, when that happens. And it was time to run.

The amazing feeling of walking into a place where you know absolutely no one, where you are as anonymous as the dust on the ground, where without the passport in your bag or the dog tag on your neck, post-mortem identification would be an impossible feat - that feeling, if you don’t know it yet, is one you want to experience, at least every now and then.

When you roam the streets with abandon
With no one to call on, no one to meet,
Is it left or right? up or down?
Lets decide at the toss of a dice.

When every stranger is your friend,
When every friend is a stranger,
What is heaven, what is earth?
When all around you is paradise.

Age brings with it, pragmatism. Reality and responsibility eventually nudge their way into the reluctant and well guarded fortress and claim their space. Nostalgia is a sign of leaving your youth behind. And you miss home. You find yourself with questions to be answered. Thoughts to be thought. Why am I here? Do I belong? Should I go home? Philosophy gives way to practicality. When the scales of the world are tipping, when the land of opportunity is calling, what is that still keeps in the old world? The answer is not so easy anymore, but I am still here. And here’s why.

(To be continued)