Red Earth
yearning & a rattlesnake
I’ve been missing my old life. I miss my friends, I miss being outdoors, I miss being outdoors in Seattle, I miss the feeling of being at the center of the Empire - for better or worse. This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that so many intelligent, successful, young people in Bangalore want desperately to be part of the American dream.
Aspiring India escapees find it incomprehensible that I’ve returned: swam my way back to Alcatraz, braving freezing waters and fictitious sharks.
My answer on why I returned is stronger on some days than it is on others. I decided to move back to India because I think I can live a freer and fuller life here. I can do what I want, be who I want - without worrying about a visa or worrying too much about censorship*. I decided to move back to build conviction in my life choices. I decided to move back to solve more meaningful problems. I decided to move back to be closer to family, to be closer to certainty, to build on solid ground. But when intelligent, successful, young people, who have all of the things for which I moved back, talk wistfully about escape, the ground doesn’t feel all that solid.
Disappointment is a fascinating feeling. It echoes inside you like a bell in a tower. It radiates from you like microwaves, making those around you uncomfortably and unevenly warm.
The grass is always greener on the other side. The American Dream is enchanting, especially when you’re not in America, and especially when you’re in service of it, as many in Bangalore tend to be - working late into the night, demoing made-in-India SaaS products to American customers, pitching cost-arbitrage-based deeptech ideas to American investors. The idea of a dollarized income, a supersized car, cheap gas (a wondrous relic), and a broad sense of contentment with life are thrilling when you’re trying to estimate how many years you can spend in bumpy rickshaws with broken suspensions before your back finally gives out.
There’s a question a friend asked me in the aftermath of a breakup, that I have now started applying to my yearning for this past life: “Do you just miss him, or do you think that something has fundamentally change in either of you for a reconciliation to make sense?”
The answer is no, at least not yet. I don’t think I’ve changed enough to want to return to a business school classroom, to corporate America. There’s so much to experience, to try, to be that I want to do here and now. And despite frothy AI GTM jobs a-dime-a-dozen in the Bay Area, I don’t think America’s changed either.
In some ways, my decision to move to India has been more educated than the desire of the intelligent, successful, young people to move to America. In other ways, it isn’t as educated as it is hedged. I’ve jumped, but the second year of business school, and a return to my old life, is a thick cord around my waist. I don’t know whether this cord is preventing me from falling into an abyss (of what? mediocrity, oblivion?) or if it’s suffocating me, my insides getting ground to a pulp in its vice grip.
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Disappointment sits in the long hallway between the door behind you and the door in front of you: a coiled up rattlesnake, rattling its rattle, warning you that the door ahead may be too far to reach, to difficult to open. You look into its amber eyes, paralysed. But the door behind you isn’t an option, you have to go forward. You can decide to ignore the rattlesnake - assume it can’t get you if you don’t acknowledge its existence. Or you can sprint towards the next door, the fear a propellant. Or you can put a bucket over it, (hopefully) contain it, (metaphorically) defang it. Or you can prod it with a stick, make it roar its head and bite deep into your ankle.
Life is a series of stories we tell ourselves and others, and lately the story I’m telling is turning out to be a pretty bad one. I’m at the one year mark of having decided to take a break from business school, and I’m obsessing over what I’ve accomplished in this year. I tried and I failed. I loved and I lost. I started and I quit. My bookkeeping makes no allowances for the future: it doesn’t acknowledge that the business of life is a going concern, that successes and failures are flows, not stocks.
I can feel the snake’s fangs pierce my skin, it’s venom seeping up my leg. I need to act before I’m consumed (so dramatic, I know). I need a tourniquet, containment. I have to remind myself: I’m not at the finish line, I’m solidly mid-journey. My success doesn’t depend on wether I get a flat tire, it depends on whether I can figure out how to repair it and keep going. Like Chekov said: “I may not have amazing victories, but I can amaze you with the defeats I came out of alive”.
I also need an anti-dote, something that cures even the affected areas. I have to remind myself, like I did the last time I was in a rut, that when the goal is to experience, everything is a win. And at this point, the goal should be to experience - experiences compound.
And I need to find a way to keep going despite having gotten bit once, knowing that I can get bitten again. Then the goal is not just to experience, it’s to try really damn hard. It’s to fight the tooth and nail, by myself and with others: not letting it scare me into reticence, and not letting it get a second bite.
The grass may be greener on the other side, but the earth is redder here. It’s warm, dense and it smells like rain. It’s alive. It stains my white socks, as if in acknowledgement. I take a picture of the red earth: mounds lining a freshly planted flowerbed, returning the acknowledgement. Both of us trying to play our part to create more beauty and meaning in a country that (sometimes secretly) overflows with beauty and meaning. Both of us try to not get washed away by a monsoon downpour.
*This article shares some thoughts and feelings about being a young person in India that were conceived before the beginning of the CJP protest. The protests have filled me with a deep sense of optimism about India being a place where young people from all walks of life are able to come together to make their voice heard, as they did during the CAA-NRC protests before this, and the IAC protests before that.
I am acutely aware of my privilege, my ability to side-step a lot of the systems by which many in this country live, and many die. This privilege compounds my solidarity — I want everyone in my country to have access to the kind of education, healthcare and spaces that I do. Jia Tolentino writes in her 2019 essay, “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams”, that to get through politically turbulent times “with any psychological stability — to get through it without descending into an emotional abyss — a person’s best strategy is to think mostly of himself, herself.” If you’re someone who has the privilege to tolerate a bit of psychological instability and descend a few feet into an emotional abyss for the sake of others, I beseech you to do it.
The reaction to the protests, from the government, from the police, and civil society at large has also filled me with a sense of grief: I grieve for a generation of young people who’s parents and grandparents are not willing to fight for a better future for them. Young people who have to take on the mantle of demanding a better future and enduring a difficult present.
If you’d like to learn about ways to help, please reach out.
“The goal is not just to experience. It’s to try really hard.” Damn right it is, and nobody’s better suited for that JD than YOU
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