My place in this world

It will not be an exaggeration when I assert that I am emotionally invested in, tied to, very, very specific places. 

My grandmas' villages, Sengottai and Pattamadai, are very special to me. 

Neyveli, the town where I grew up, has its own place in my heart. 

The city where I landed in America and where I earned my doctorate, Los Angeles, I cherish.

Bakersfield, though a brief interlude, matters to me a great deal.

And, for twenty years now, this wonderful place by the Willamette in a gloriously green state. 

These personal places have defined my life.  They have also given me a clear sense of rootedness and an assurance of belonging. 

Growing up in Neyveli, there was a distinct sense of home being there, while grandmas' villages were the "native places"--the places from where our people were from. 

In contrast, the city where I went to for my undergraduate degree was not "home."  I always knew it was only a transit stop. Even if the college had been a fantastic one of my dreams, I would have known within that the place itself did not matter to me.  Calcutta, on the other hand, where I lived for three months, means more to me than does Coimbatore where I earned my undergraduate degree.

I write and talk with fondness for very few places in the old country and those places were home to me.  It is good to have such a geographic rootedness, I would argue.  A belonging to a place.  A place that is home.  Barry Lopez wrote that "the effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere."  True as that is, I would take it a step further and would like people to relate to a quote that I once came across: “Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.”  If we thought about our place, our home, our relationship to the place, we are philosophers.

Whether it is Pattamadai and Sengottai, or Neyveli, or Calcutta, or ... the deep desire to know about them and understand them has been a wonderful blessing in terms of how much they have helped me know about myself.   I even routinely tell students that, without going into autoethnographic details--understanding the world, understanding the peoples, is a wonderful way to understand our own country and our own place in the grand scheme of things.

I love staying put, knowing that I belong to a place.

Staying put—fully inhabiting, loving, and stewarding the place in which you live—is a conservative idea in many respects. It’s interwoven with the idea of civic care and involvement, the importance of commitment to the political, economic, and cultural wellbeing of a community. 

A conservative idea that is also radical in how contrarian it comes across in the contemporary world where it has become increasingly common for people to live in a place but to be emotionally or professionally in a completely different place several time zones away.  Such a disconnect is progress, they say.  But, I disagree.

It is such a "conservative" commitment to the community that even spurred me to write op-eds.  Not op-eds for newspapers in the Timbuktus of the world, but for the newspapers in the community where I lived.  My father asked me more than once why I don't write for the publications in India.  I offered explanations that camouflaged the core reason--I do not feel a connect, a commitment, to India.  I couldn't bear the thought of offending him by making clear my separation from the old country.

Early in my years in Oregon, the editor of one of the newspapers to which I had contributed op-eds, asked me to write about why I authored newspaper commentaries.  It was clear to me why I did and that is what I wrote about too: Writing on issues that matter to the public is my civic responsibility.  Such a civic sense would not be there if I didn't have any geographic rootedness and commitment to a place.

Rootlessness merely adds to the existential angst.  To quote Barry Lopez again: "Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place."