where do i belong?

It is a question that consciously or unconsciously creeps into every mind at the times when a person needs to find out his or her roots. Whatever the life has been, what it could have been and what it is, create an image of what the life should be. In the course of life, we meet lot of people and some of them are the images of our own future. There is a strange similarity between the two lives, running parallel in space but differs only in the time; as if the two lives are at two different ends of the same string of time.

I met or know some such people. My life would sure follow theirs as the time passes by, if I make the choices they have made. And there is every possibility of me making those choices. But none of their lives have been a role model for me, and I can only pray that I don’t end up on those plateaus.

During one of my visits home, I met a person named Kumar, on my way from Delhi to Chandigarh. A carefree look, hippy outfit, inebriated, with two filled bottles of Bombay Safari in his bag – he was a mechanical engineer from a college in AP (so am I). He had worked in Jalandhar for some time and left his job of 3000 rupees some 15 years ago. The reason was that 3000 rupees were not enough to buy him his quota of cigarettes. He left his home and went to Leh and worked in a hotel there for some time. Then he went to Goa and started his own restaurant named ‘Namaste’, which has its branch in Thailand also. He had a Mexican girl friend, a hut in south Goa, a boat, a hammock and a dog. He said he will not marry his girl friend but they are planning to have a child. There was a bitterness of frustration in him about India and Indians, the frustration which comes when you know nothing can be done with the way life is but you cannot live with that. He was a person who knew that he had lost his struggle to the wrong, but he was running away from accepting that. He was running away from life, from the claustrophobia he felt in the world. The kind of outlook I had at that time, I could have very well turned into the same person.

Then there was this person Yoshi in Auroville (Pondicherry) who had come there from Israel after visiting almost every country of the world. One thing he said made an impression in my mind. He said: ‘I traveled across the world. But there wasn’t a place I could call my home. Then finally I came to Auroville and I have been living here since 18 years. I lived here through every situation, from the time when there were no steel utensils or LPG to cook food. I built my home here and now my roots are here. This is where I belong.’

Then during my recent visit home when I was coming back, I met another person. This person had “fifteen” years of experience in IT industry in which he had ‘worked’ (that’s what he said) in “nine” companies, that comes to less than two years per company. From those fifteen years, he had lived five years in the US. After working for fifteen years, he left IT industry and opened his consultancy firm in Delhi. The kind of choices I was about to make after coming back from home would surely have led me to that. But I never could imagine myself being that person.

Then there is my maternal grand father (my mom’s father’s brother) who had left home when he was very young. He went to Bombay and joined Indian Navy in 1960’s. Since then he has been living there and comes back to the village once in a year. Now when he has crossed 70, he returns home searching for his roots. I wonder where he belongs now and what he thinks. Will he be content that he found life away from his home and lived it through, or will he be sad that now when he has reached the end of his journey, he has gone so far that it is impossible to return to his own home, and that he will get annihilated in an alien land, where there is hardly anyone who he can call his own?

I am always left wondering at the end of such thinking sessions that where would my journey end. Where do I belong?