Where are you from?

Doing the function rounds my wife and I bump into relatives, whose basic grouse is that they do not see us as often as they would like. We try to explain that both of us are pretty engrossed with our individual careers and hobbies (reading & aimless treks), leaving us little time to make extended visits to other people’s homes. Well, this explanation is more often than not met with a sideways east-west swing of the head signifying a degree of incomprehension and disapproval.

Another often asked question is that why we do not visit our ancestral villages more often. That’s a fair question but do we really relate to tiny far away villages or towns that we had some connect to in the distant past but not in a bit any more?

A month ago I made a rather hurried visit to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu and was happy to exit the city after a day, as the heat seemed to reduce me to a state of zombie like existence. On returning I mentioned this to a close relative of mine, who surprised me by saying that our forefathers lived there in the hoary past. He went on to say, that our family moved south to Mysore from Varanasi, during the time that the Mughal King Aurangzeb (His reign lasted all of for 49 years from 1658 until his death in 1707) was up to his mischief and then further moved to Coimbatore when Tipu Sultan ruled Mysore ( 1782 – 1799).

The fact of the matter is that I have little or no nostalgia for either Varanasi, Mysore or Coimbatore. Does that make me unemotional and ungrateful? Well I have no answer that can explain this seeming lack of empathy for the place of origin of my fore fathers.

As I grew up in Visakhapatnam, I manfully manage some Telugu and I’m mistaken to be an Andhrite (now may be called – Seema Andhrite, after the rather turbulent division of that state a few months ago). A young man, from Andhra Pradesh kept questioning me as to where I was really from? Unable to find a suitable answer, as I'm pretty rootless and a tad irritated I told him that I probably hailed from the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, where humans are said to have originated many million years ago!

To obfuscate the discussion further, a fairly good part of my life was spent on a ship. Should that or the sea be called home? Today I live in Bengaluru and look to the city for succor and sustenance and consider the city my home. I do not look back with moist eyes and a heart filled with longing to places where my ancestors seem to have parked themselves over many thousand years.

In a flat world as people traverse the world for jobs, it is comforting to look back through rose tinted glasses which leave many confused and an inability to settle themselves in a new place.

As David Guterson said - There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/nostalgia.html#o0kvBl0euMLT6grX.99