<div class='bc_element' id='bc_element'1 style=' background:#FFFFFF;color:#000000;font-family:Verdana;width:auto;padding:5px;max-height:100%;'><span><p>When you leave the country you were born in, you imagine that you are simply moving. A change of address. A new city, maybe a new language. But what you don’t realize until much later is that you are also entering a lifelong negotiation with the idea of home.</p><p><br></p><p>For the Indian diaspora in the United States — and countless others who have crossed oceans for opportunity, education, or survival — “home” stops being a static concept. It becomes fluid, fragmented, and sometimes, painfully elusive.</p><p><br></p><p>Is it a person? A place? Or just a feeling you’re constantly chasing?</p><p><br></p><p><b>When Home Was a Place</b></p><p><br></p><p>For much of life in India, home was easy to define. It was the yellow house on the corner, the street where the fruit vendor knew your mother’s name, the cricket matches with neighborhood kids. It was Madurai, Mumbai, Mangalore — a pin on a map and a stamp in your memories.</p><p><br></p><p>When you arrive in a new country, however, those certainties dissolve. The streets are unfamiliar. The languages around you feel cold and distant. Even the air smells different.</p><p><br></p><p>You try to replicate home — a pot of dal on the stove, the crackle of cumin in hot oil, a Diwali diyas lighting up a rental apartment. But somewhere deep down, you know these are echoes, not the original song.</p><p><br></p><p><b>When Home Becomes a Person</b></p><p><br></p><p>As years pass, you realize home shifts from being a place to being people.</p><p><br></p><p>It’s the friend who remembers to call you on Holi. The coworker who offers you a seat at their Thanksgiving table. The stranger who pronounces your name correctly without hesitation.</p><p><br></p><p>Sometimes it’s your partner — someone who grew up thousands of miles away from where you did but somehow stitches their life with yours into a shared quilt. Sometimes it’s your child, whose first language is English but who asks you to tie a rakhi on his wrist every August.</p><p><br></p><p>In a foreign land, people become anchors. They remind you that home isn't always about where you are. Sometimes it's about who you are with.</p><p><br></p><p><b>When Home Is a Feeling</b></p><p><br></p><p>And then there are days — rare, fragile — when you realize home is neither a place nor a person. It’s a feeling.</p><p><br></p><p>It’s the warmth in your chest when you hear a stranger humming an old Kishore Kumar song on a subway platform.</p><p>It’s the smell of jasmine somewhere on a summer evening that makes you forget for a second that you’re 8,000 miles away from where you started.</p><p>It’s the comfort of switching between languages mid-sentence and knowing the person next to you understands.</p><p><br></p><p>Home is the sense of ease that floods you unexpectedly, reminding you that maybe you don’t have to choose one over the other. Maybe home is all the places you’ve loved layered on top of each other.</p><p><br></p><p>For many in the diaspora, this search never ends. There’s always a tug — between the country of your birth and the country of your future. Between nostalgia and ambition. Between wanting to belong and fearing you never fully will.</p><p><br></p><p>Some of us find home in passports and permanent residencies. Some find it in WhatsApp groups with family 10 time zones away. Some in the annual trip to India that feels more alien each time.</p><p><br></p><p>And some — perhaps most — learn to live in the in-between. A life where "Where are you from?" is a complicated question, and "Where is home?" an even harder one.</p><p><br></p><p>Maybe Home Is Meant to Be Rewritten. Maybe home isn’t something you find. Maybe it’s something you build, quietly, over years — a mosaic of smells, faces, memories, and feelings that you carry wherever you go.</p><p><br></p><p>Maybe it's less about having one true home, and more about being at home within yourself — no matter how foreign the land, how unfamiliar the streets, or how heavy the winters.</p><p><br></p><p>Because in the end, home might not be a person, a place, or a feeling. Maybe it's all three — stitched together by time, migration, and memory.</p><span></div>