There's this conversation in the movie
Garden State that really hits home.
Andrew (Zach Braff): You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in... isn't really your home anymore. All of a sudden, even though you have some place where you put your shit... that idea of home is gone.
Sam (Natalie Portman): I still feel at home in my house.
Andrew: You'll see one day when you move out. Just sorta happens one day, and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist.
Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know? You won't ever have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself. You know, for... For your kids. For the family you start. It's like a cycle or something.
I don't know. But I miss the idea of it, you know?
Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.
Sam: Maybe.
I don't think I myself have reached that state yet, I can still feel at home when I go back to Bangalore. It is still too early to refer to it as my parent's place. Nevertheless, these past four years I couldn't help but notice that there was a small amount of disconnect between the idea of home and the house I grew up in. Maybe it was this that made me go back ever so often, four or five times a semester, more if I could manage it.
And now. Now I stand at the threshold of going somewhere much farther away, to some place from where I cannot keep running back whenever I feel the disconnect grow. And I know that I will not be back (except as a visitor) for another eight or ten years. Perhaps I will be lucky enough to make some place my home before then.
The disconnect with Bangalore is more evident though. The home city of my dreams now seems temporal in nature, and I am unable to identify with the dust, the smoke and the glitzy buildings that greet me when I go back there. Don't get me wrong. This isn't a post about how the city's gone to the dumps in these past few years, where the good citizens no longer go to bed by 10 at night and wake up by 6 in the morning to
Kausalya supraja rama purva sandhya pravartathes and go to discotheques and pubs instead. As sad as that certainly is,
enough people have opined on the subject, and in a more timely manner.
It's just about me expressing a sense of loss of the Bangalore of SM Krishna - during the early days of the IT industry, which I have since come to know as my 'home city'.
A new home I may find. You know what they say.
Home is where the heart is and all that. But a new home city? That would certainly be more unlikely.
