You can always leave but never go back
Source : Google photo
Synopsis : It is true that most people stay where they are born or near it in most countries but this is mostly true in rural areas while the city dwellers who get education and other skills become more mobile so they go where they find jobs. Some go abroad to seek better opportunities thus a huge diaspora develops far from their homeland. While this diaspora tries to maintain some link with their place of origin , most can never go back there due to many reasons the blog looks at.
A friend of mine once told me that one can always leave his home town but can seldom go back. There is a lot of truth in this statement and I too fall into this category of Diaspora living abroad for the past 50 years so I feel that the time has come for me to analyze this phenomenon of why most people who leave cannot go back to their place of origin. It is a worldwide phenomenon that should not be misconstrued as a migrant problem.
The temporary migrant workers in the Middle East for example number in millions but rarely anyone stays there for good. They all have a temporary permit to work but must leave at the end of their contract.
I am writing about those people like myself who have left their country and settled in another country quite unlike the ones they left behind and literally turned a new page in their life. So this is the story of the Diaspora but here too there are those who forsake their homeland for good and become a citizen of another country and there are those like myself who always remain attached to their home country through a piece of ID card euphemistically called a passport.
My home town was a pleasant, sleepy, placid and a rather unexciting town where the annual exhibition or a circus once in a few years was the high light of the year. I say was because it no longer has the unenviable status of a placid, boring city that it once was but has become rather worse. I grew up there like anyone else, started schooling at the age of five, went to high school and later college, got to know a few neighborhood kids who were my playmates up to a certain age and had the common aspiration of graduating and finding a good job somewhere, perhaps get married (through arranged marriage) and raise a family just like others.
I saw what the elders were doing going to the market with a basket to buy vegetable and fish everyday or going to the doctor for a bottle of medicine for their sick child or going to pay their bills that showed up like a hated routine. I saw them going through life with a monotony that would drive any ambitious person to distraction and tried to imagine what life would be like for me if I stayed and followed the same routine.
I was the errand boy of the family so I had to shop for all the things they needed every month, pay the bills of electricity and water, fall in line to buy the subsidized food grains from the government approved ration shops, bring the wheat to the mill for grinding to make flour, fall in line at 4 am in the coal yard to buy 20 kgs of coal a week that they allowed and came back home at 2pm without breakfast and lunch, ran errands for everybody else as well because I never could refuse anyone anything. I even had to iron my sister’s saris with a charcoal iron that got very hot and brought her to the train station at 4 am every now and then just because she would not take the bus for some reason.