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There are many songs I could use for this post. The first one is Oorelipota Mama by ChowRaasta, for which I want to do a further lyrical translation and breakdown than I did in this one tweet.

The second one is I hope I become a Ghost from the funny-and-sentimental World’s Greatest Dad starring Robin Williams. Watch the video! See that robot search for home, see the ghost help the robot! The ghost has no home to go to. Don’t think about it too much (I am always sarcastic when I say this, how does one even do that?).

The third one is from the very indie Russophone Ukrainian metal band Ідол - Куда ты пойдёшь? - “Where will you go?”. I have looked in vain for the lyrics.

Home country is a hard definition for me. I did not intentionally make America my home - I moved there when I was 8 and made the best of the situation. It’s a great situation! By many metrics, I am doing very, very well and I am grateful for the economic opportunities that an English-language education in America, in one of the top universities has done and will do for me. But that still doesn’t make America my “home”. Also, I intentionally did not make America my home. I tried to assimilate and yet, always felt out of place. Some of that is internalized stress and anxiety about being the foreign kid who speaks weird and smells weird to those around me, some of it is also internalized cultural norms. Ideas of personal space, habits, noises, it’s all a bit hard to reprogram those in yourself. I didn’t take the time to do so in a way that would make America ‘home’ for me.

There’s the additional element of “Do I belong in this story?”. Big country-nation-geopolitics things are too hard to wrangle and so I think I’ll just leave them alone for some time. I went back to India in 2016 knowing full well that I would experience the classic ABCD culture shock combined with the “man out of time” syndrome. The second bit is what Oorelipota Mama is all about - what home are you returning to? What idealized life did you imagine was there? What do you think happened while you were gone? The forces of capital, ambition and nature didn’t pause in the old place.

There’s a scene from the Simpsons which partially played out in real life a few years ago:

Nuwan: Everyone, it’s 7 pm, let’s go for a walk while the sun is still out!

A few minutes pass, we all gather and walk for 10-15 minutes and take a left onto a very wooded road.

Nuwan: Wait, it’s getting darker here, let’s go back up the road where there’s more light.

Everyone looked at Nuwan, waiting for him to realize his mistake - going back, of course, wouldn’t bring the sun back up.

I associate my childhood and the carefree nature of childhood with India and Indian life in general. It’s not reality. Life would have been hard had I stayed. Life was hard in its own way in America. It’s very easy though to fantasize about going back to that place where things were simpler. It was the era that defined my feelings as much as the location. You never step in the same river twice and you can never go back home.

You can, however, build a new home! I have put a lot of thought into this before, but I’ve never penned the thoughts to paper. Rather than wrestling with the past and grand definitions of home, I can just make the one that I want and build towards it.