So a place you have never been to might be "home" to you?
It was illustrated perfectly when Tony Soprano went to Italy. They call themselves Italian and will say Italy is their home, but when they actually go there all they can say is "fuck, THIS is Italy?". And they notice that they're not adapted to the country at all.
The same could happen to you guys. You'll see. It's not home.
The Tony Soprano case is a good example.
Or even if you leave a place and come back years later. There's this fallacy that a land or a people or a home are in stasis, frozen in time for you to pop out of the cryogenic lab anytime you want to go back.
But you know what? It always changes, with or without you. The one thing you can always count on is the change. You're kidding yourself if you think the place you left, or have yet ever to see, isn't changing without you -- changing away from what you identify as home.
One of the great ironies in the Cape Town paper this morning was a story about world immigration. South Africa had about 220,000 last year, the most in the world, with the U.S. second at 42,000. At least the "legal" kind, I suppose where those numbers came from. Israel, it reported, is facing immigration issues like any other country on earth. Africans are bypassing the mess in Egypt and heading straight for Israel in search of jobs, income, a more stable family life -- changing Israel's cultural landscape.
It just supports this notion that a "true" race or culture is just a momentary fallacy. We are all changing, and there's nothing any nation can do to stop it. Only to slow it down.
For real? I never heard about this before.
It does sound like you were living in a complete India bubble if you felt so at home in India instantly.
Oddly, I kind of experienced that myself. I've been in a lot of places around the world, and when I was in India for the first time, even this white boy was struck by something strange there. I felt like it was completely foreign, like another planet, but at the same time I identified with the people and the thinking and the life there intimately. For some bizarre reason, it resonated with me like no place else on earth other than my home country. It made me half-jokingly believe that I must have been a Desi in a previous life.
I don't quite know how to explain that. It's like I felt as if I were on another planet but yet closer to my more primitive, essential self at the same time. It's pretty f'ed up.