Hai Ve Mere , Daadia Rabba

Was listening to a song today from the movie "Swadesh" called "Yeh jo des hai tera". Awesome. I remember watching the movie sometime during those last few months in Edinburgh with my flatmates. At that time, I had been away from home for more than 2 years. 2 years without touching Indian soil, without seeing my parents, getting hugs from Mom and lectures from Dad, without fighting with my brothers. That's a long time.

I had always thought of myself as someone who didn't really need all of that, who was just happy being on my own, doing my own thing. Towards the end of those 2 years, though, I found myself becoming positively soppy and sentimental whenever I thought about my family and friends back home. I guess it was a lot of things. I wasn't having any luck getting a job, I was working crazy hours in a call centre to try and earn some extra cash, things weren't too good on the personal front for the last few months as well. I guess it was all coming to a head, but I just could not do it anymore. I had no energy left...I was drained. Of energy, of emotion, of motivation. Maybe if I had come home in the middle for a short vacation, I could have stuck around for a little while longer and tried to get a job, but....well, I just could not fight the battle anymore. I needed to come home.

So I made the necessary preparations, got things sorted with the uni, bank, landlord, etc. When I booked my (one-way) ticket home, then it hit me. I was going home. Was I scared? Definitely. Felt like a bit of a failure cos most of my friends got jobs when they went abroad. Besides, I love Edinburgh. That city and it's people will always hold a special place in my heart. But I missed Madras like crazy. I was watching quite a few Hindi movies ( and a few Tamil movies, too) and found myself getting all misty-eyed (only figuratively, of course- the Dragon does not show emotion-like a rock, He is). I imagined what it would be like on the flight home. How I would feel when I first saw my homeland again. Whether I would (figuratively speaking again) shed a tear or two. There were two songs I used to listen to which would take me right there, sitting in the plane, looking out the window, catching my first glimpse of my homeland in more than two years. One of them was "Punjab" by Karunesh, and the other was "Yeh jo des hai tera" from Swadesh.

Of course, when I did actually fly in and catch that first glimpse of India, there wasn't much music happening. There were the usual sounds- babies crying, old men belching loudly, my friend Sandeep sitting next to me and looking unhappy- understandable because he was sitting between two people, each of whom were, at a conservative estimate, three times his size. My first glimpse of India on that flight, by the way, was Dharavi, the world's second largest slum. I never imagined I would be so happy to see a place whose name is synonymous with poverty, squalor, and everything that's wrong with India.

But hell, it was India, wasn't it?

At long last, I was home.