Sometimes I wonder if what I long for ever truly existed.
It’s nostalgia, or something close to it. A memory of a past that is more dream than truth, a version of home that feels real in my head but dissolves the moment I try to grasp it. I see a reel on Instagram of familiar old streets or festivals, and I feel a pull, a desire to go back. But when I actually arrive home, I’m met with another truth: life there isn’t quite like the picture in my mind. The longing is for an idea, not a reality. That feeling sharpens in places where civic order stands out.
I’ve built a higher-quality life elsewhere, one that in many ways exceeds what I once dreamed of. Logically, I know this. My routines, my work, my travels, my friend circle, and even my comforts are all signs of a life that has moved forward. And yet, in the quiet, I still feel a tug towards something that no longer exists. Or perhaps never did.
Maybe it’s just overthinking, my mind replaying loops of what-ifs and half-memories. Maybe it’s the absence of daily gratitude, the failure to pause and truly see the life I already have. Or maybe it’s something deeper: the ache of not fully belonging anywhere.
At home, the feeling is stronger. The rooms and voices carry memories of who I once was, and yet I stand both inside them and outside them at once. I belong there by blood and memory, but also not quite, because life has carried me elsewhere. Currently, I am home, celebrating Onam with family and friends, and that has only made the feeling stronger.
This is probably a dilemma every male NRI faces at some point in life: the confusion between belonging and nostalgia. We move forward and build lives elsewhere, yet the pull of home is never fully gone. This is simply my journey, and my version of it.
Longing, I realise, is rarely about place. It is about belonging. It is about the way we want to be claimed by a moment, a community, a memory, even if the version we yearn for is imagined.
And so I hold both truths: the life I have built, which is richer than my dreams, and the longing for something half-real, half-invented. Perhaps the work is not to resolve it, but to live with it, to let nostalgia visit without letting it claim ownership over the present.
Because maybe that longing is simply a reminder of who I was, and how far I have travelled.
I don't think we humans are wired to optimise just for "I" and all the comforts around "self".
The longing you feel is of an unbalanced equation, and in some ways you could think of giving back to something bigger than just the "self" - kids, community, nation or humanity.
The derived joy out of it would be much higher than all the comforts that brings you today.