The n+5 theorem

This post was due on the 27th of July. I wrote about Allan Border instead. You know, birthday boys and girls are special. However, the day marked another significant little personal milestone for me. An anniversary of significance. Five long years ago on that day, Avinash and I boarded a Delta Airlines airplane wearing a ridiculous suit, with loads of relatives happy to see us off and a Brief History of Time as reading material (We were sad, sad people then. I’ll reserve my comments on the situation now). The trip abroad for a Masters is a strange little journey. It is a shift of the magnitude of the movement of tectonic plates. The breaking up of world into continents. Literally. It is a fabulous experience, a coming-of-age for home-grown boys like me, a step into a life which is tangentially opposite to the one you know (today’s generation is much more informed than us, you know the one’s the pronounce the J in Jansport with a Y), a rite of passage that will shadow you for the rest of your life.

Therein lies the dilemma. How influential is the shadow? How long will the effects linger? How long are you bound to stay in this country? Graduate students often fail to clearly answer the one question that they should have answered foremost: why exactly are they here? For the love of God, money, education, partying, freedom, women, men, rental cars, Walmart, rental apartments, unlimited refills of soda, Taco Bell, long weekend deals, rolling R’s: one of these, all, or none? They get to the US, get through their Masters, get their first paycheck, their first car, first serious attempts at arranged nuptials, actually getting married, getting their H1B visa stamped, applying for the green card, buying the first house, fussing about their lawn, buy bulk groceries from Costco and if productive, have a couple of babies too. The seemingly unbreakable sequence of events stated above is punctuated with trips to India where a few tears are shed with the parents, comments made about how India is progressing, observations made about how the country has changed beyond recognition, pleasant nods made when told that kids are best brought up in India, US’s role in world affairs is tch-tched, and a general doomsday prediction is made about how your life will go down the drain if you decided to stay on forever in the US.

Sum of all fears, expectations and conversations is a common refrain: I’ll come back to India in five years. Somehow, the magical number of five has stuck. Perhaps it has do with the arithmetic around finishing your degree in two-three years, getting a job and recovering or accumulating some money, depending upon how graduate life has treated you. Somehow, five seems the talismanic number that people agree upon is a good time to have enjoyed the good life before they head back to their roots. Somehow, five seems to be the acceptable threshold at which you haven’t done too much to break all ties with your family and friends, where you and your American passport-holding kids will have least trouble adjusting back to the reformed India.

Which is what makes the five year anniversary a significant date. I have gone through the above mentioned steps but find myself firmly entrenched in a life that I have built out of choice. There are still the trips to India, still the talks about how it is better than ever before to go back, to blend in. There are still beliefs that one so attuned to the comforts of the west will not have to cut back heavily on the benefits as India is fast catching up. There are still talks about how life is empty without having family close by.

However, if it were all so easy to pack up and start all over again, why isn’t it so? It’s a vicious cycle of voluntary entrenchment. You dig your heels in, enjoy the stability and yearn to be swept off by the ocean waters you see from your stakeout place on the top of the trees. There is still always the hope, always the desire, for you know you don't belong here. The plan to return is always existent, just difficult to implement. So, here, ladies and gentlemen is my most realistic assessment on the situation. My theorem about returning back to India. I’ll go back to India in five years time … from today.