I flew back to the United States from India last night and was reminded, yet again, that some of us spend our lives returning to places that both know us and misread us.
Every time I go back to India, my voice arrives before I do.
Someone hears the American edges in my accent and thinks the story is obvious. In their minds, I become the Indian American visiting the old country, not the boy who grew up in Bangalore in the 1970s and 80s before life carried him elsewhere. Then I return to the United States and the equation shifts again. America has marked me too – my pace, my instincts, my style, even the way I move through a room. I can seem familiar here in certain moments, but not so fully that I am no longer read through the fact of having come from somewhere else.
For most of my life, I treated that ambiguity as background noise. Lately, I have begun to think it is something else.
It is the shape of a great many modern lives.
We still ask one another to be simpler than we are. We want a clean answer to where someone is from, what made them, which place gets to claim them most fully. That hunger for neatness is understandable. It is also deeply out of step with the way many people now live. Some of us were formed in one place, stretched in another, translated across several, and left to build coherence from pieces that were never meant to be stitched this easily together. After a while, the point stops being whether others understand that quickly. And becomes more about learning to live it without apology.
That sounds more graceful than it has felt.
Last week, in India, I met a group of friends I had not seen in 38 years. And just like that, time folded in on itself. The faces had changed. The lives had expanded. The years had done what years do. But something in the room remained untouched by all the distance that followed. For a moment, I was no longer the person moving between countries, accents, and expectations. I was simply someone returned to an earlier version of himself, one that had been waiting quietly beneath all the departures. Memory has a way of doing that. It does not erase the life you built elsewhere, but it reminds you that some parts of home never stopped living inside you.
Seeing them was a gift. It was also a reminder of what distance does. You can return to people who knew you before the world enlarged you and realize, with gratitude and sadness at once, that memory keeps more alive than proximity does, but not everything.
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A life lived across countries can look expansive from the outside. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is just expensive in ways people do not see. Distance has a way of thinning things. Friends become occasional voices. Family becomes memory mixed with logistics. Relationships that once depended on proximity begin surviving on intention alone, and intention, however sincere, is not always enough. In my case, distance was only part of the story. I also know myself well enough to admit that detachment has been one of my own survival skills. I adapt quickly. I settle fast. I find my footing anywhere. Those qualities helped me build a life in more than one world. They also made it easier, at times, to keep moving when staying emotionally present might have asked more of me.
That is the less glamorous truth about becoming portable. You learn how to arrive. You also learn, perhaps too well, how to leave.
Still, for all that movement has taken, I cannot deny what it has given. Wonder has remained one of the great engines of my life. Curiosity too. The world has always felt too large, too textured, too alive to experience through one national script alone. I have never understood the impulse to let one country do all the explaining. Not because rootedness has no value. It has enormous value. There is depth in staying. There is love in being known over time. There is dignity in belonging to a place so fully that its seasons live inside you. But there is another kind of education that comes from crossing, from being unsettled and reoriented, from discovering that the assumptions that once felt natural were often just local habits that had never been challenged.
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Travel, when it is real, rearranges your sense of proportion. It humbles you. It exposes how quickly people confuse familiarity with truth. It reminds you that entire worlds of meaning are unfolding all the time beyond the reach of your own biography. There is freedom in that realization. There is also relief. You no longer have to treat your first context as the final word on what it means to be human.
Somewhere over the years, without planning to, I built a life around that feeling. Or maybe I built a self around it. A way of entering new places without panic. A way of locating comfort without demanding sameness. A way of reading the room, listening for rhythm, adjusting without feeling erased. I am not fully fluent everywhere I go. I miss cues. I misunderstand things. There are layers of history and intimacy that belong more naturally to those who never left. I know that. But complete fluency is not the only honest way to inhabit a place. There is also something to be said for arriving with enough humility to observe, enough admiration to appreciate, and enough steadiness to avoid being threatened by what you do not immediately understand.
Maybe that is what I have been learning all along: home is a skill.
For some people, home is inherited so deeply they barely notice it until it is disrupted. For others, it is assembled. Piece by piece. From memory, ritual, appetite, instinct, language, posture, and the repeated act of beginning again. You learn what settles your nervous system. You learn what gives you peace in strange places. You learn how to make a life quickly without making it shallow. You learn that comfort can come from very small things – a certain kind of tea, an early walk in a new neighborhood, the confidence that you can find your way, the ability to sit alone in a city that owes you nothing and still feel unafraid.
The older I get, the less I think this is only about me.
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More and more people will spend their lives moving between geographies, cultures, identities, loyalties, and selves. Some will do it by choice. Some by ambition. Some because history will leave them no alternative. And still we continue to prepare people for a world that no longer exists, one in which identity is stable, belonging is singular, and the self remains legible from start to finish. That fiction is wearing thin. The future is going to ask more of us. It will ask whether we can cross into unfamiliar places without shrinking into fear, defensiveness, or performance. It will ask whether we can remain open without becoming hollow. It will ask whether we can carry enough inner structure that movement expands us without dissolving us.
This may be one reason I care so much about global education and why I find some of the language around it so painfully small. We reduce it to opportunity, mobility, exposure, prestige, marketability. Those things are easy to count and easy to sell. The deeper value is harder to package. It lies in what happens to a person when the world refuses to mirror them back in the ways they expected. It lies in learning that unfamiliarity is not danger. It lies in being forced to confront how partial your own worldview has always been. At its best, global education does not simply make people more informed. It makes them less fragile.
That matters more than ever.
We are living through a period of narrowing, even as the world itself keeps widening. People are retreating into identity as shelter, nation as certainty, and familiarity as moral proof. Under those conditions, the ability to move through difference with grace stops being a personality trait. It becomes a form of readiness. Perhaps even a form of wisdom.
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There is another side to all of this, and age has made me respect it more. The rooted life teaches things the mobile life cannot. Staying long enough to be inconvenienced by a place, claimed by it, obligated to it, changed by it in ways you did not choose – that carries a seriousness of its own. I do not dismiss that. I respect it more now than I once did. But I have also come to believe that some lives are simply built differently. Some of us were never going to be held by one place alone. Some of us were always going to have to build home on the move and learn how to do it without becoming careless, performative, or numb.
That is harder than it sounds.
It asks for curiosity, restraint, confidence, reverence, openness, and some kind of anchor. Otherwise mobility becomes consumption. Otherwise movement becomes a way of skimming the surface of life while mistaking motion for depth.
Maybe that is the distinction that matters most. Not whether someone stays or leaves, but whether they know how to inhabit their choices with seriousness. Whether they know how to love a place without claiming to own it. Whether they know how to leave without pretending nothing was lost. Whether they can keep discovering without turning detachment into identity.
I used to think the ambiguity of my life was something to resolve. A problem of classification. A story that needed to be made cleaner than it really was. I do not think that anymore. I think I was given a life that required assembly. I think I have spent years building a sense of home across departures and returns, across wonder and distance, across the countries that made me and the distances that changed me. And I suspect I am far from alone.
Some people inherit home.
Some people learn it.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
