Skip to main content

Country roads, take me home



One of the favourite songs of my youth was ‘Take me home country roads’ by John Denver. I was a denizen of Shillong in those days. Shillong had uncanny knack for making people feel out of place. The place made me feel like a second-class citizen all through the 15 years of my subsistence there. [One of the chapters of my memoirs, Autumn Shadows, has that title: ‘Second-class citizen’.] It’s only natural that I yearned for a better place, one that made me feel at home.
Why didn’t I leave the place sooner than I did? That is one of the mysteries of life. Destiny. Probably, I was scared of venturing out to a new place. Probably, I lacked the confidence that I would find a good job elsewhere. When I left Shillong finally, it was more out of a compulsion than my choice. I was ejected, so to say.
I spent the next decade and a half in Delhi, the place which I didn’t want to leave until my retirement. I liked Delhi for various reasons. It left you alone, for one. Delhi was the least bothered about your religious inclinations or disinclinations, your political views, your intellectual stands, and so on. Everyone was busy doing their own things. I was lost in that vast multitude of people. I savoured the anonymity.
The autumn of my life took me to my village. I wanted a relaxed life. I thought my native place was the place I belonged to. Rather, maybe, I longed to belong there. Now, five years after my rendezvous with my birthplace, I wonder whether this was what I wanted.
I don’t mind making another choice now. Even my age doesn’t deter me. The other day an old student of mine rang me from Japan and told me that English teachers were in demand in that country. “Age is just a number, sir,” he said with a laugh. I laughed too. Age hasn’t started bothering me yet. “You need to pass a simple test in Japanese language,” he added. “Just elementary knowledge. Most of the Japanese don’t know English beyond the rudimentary things.” That put me off. I am not going to work with the mystifying shapes of the Japanese alphabet now.
A friend whom I met quite by chance the other day told me about teaching jobs in Thailand. I toyed with that too. I think somewhere in a dark corner of my heart, Thailand awakens occasionally like Denver’s country roads.
Your place chooses you, I think, rather than the other way around. Delhi chose me as no other place has done so far. Now with all that’s happening in the country, my heart longs for an escape. Longs for “the place I belong.” Somewhere “dark and dusty” with a “misty taste of moonshine” and perhaps a “teardrop in my eye.”
I have quite a few friends, relatives and old students who live abroad. From Australia to Canada, from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia, a lot of countries have been chosen by these people to settle down. They have given me the impression that they are happy there. Most of them have told me in no uncertain terms that they are happier there than here. Patriotism is a different sentiment altogether.
I find myself longing for a change. That’s why I suggested the topic for this week’s Indispire:


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...