After spending a marvellous year in Glasgow I came back home last week. I was quite excited as I landed at the Calcutta airport and got a feel of being home after such a long time. I was happy to be back and relive the wonderful life as I used to all these years but to my greatest astonishment, things around were so not same. When I went to Glasgow, things were not this strange though it was an alien country, may be because I was expecting stuffs to be different hence I was prepared. But when I came back home it should have been normal which wasn’t to be. Since the very moment I landed in India I could notice the difference. I could sense being a foreigner in my own home-land, strange but true. The journey from Howrah bride and the Clyde arc and back to the Howrah bridge had changed things completely. Don’t know what the change was? The actual view or my point of view but certainly things around were not the same.
Daily activities which I was so accustomed to, now seemed outlandish. Using plastic money instead of cash was so not desired, if at all I used my card for making payments it was just a swipe without having to enter the PIN. So card becomes as vulnerable as cash, if I lose It it’s like losing hard money. Yes cakes were available in bakeries but local sondesh and misti doi would reign supreme. Since childhood I loved 5star but all of a sudden I was missing Racer and did not want it to be replaced. I started to feel how inexpensive things were. A tenner currency note seemed to be nothing (practically valueless). Forcing myself through a crowd of people to avoid queuing was so wired and unacceptable for me now. Honking while driving was another irritating aspect, though I would do it so often a year back, now it would get the hell out of me. Partying all day long without sipping a single drop of alcohol sounded baseless. How was this possible? This indeed was one big change in me - soft drinks getting replaced by the harder ones. The ‘T’ that initially would be ThumsUp, now more often represented Tennents.
One of the modules in the university taught me how to overcome cultural barrier if you visit a foreign land. It explicitly told about the ways in which an expatriate should behave and perform so as to adjust in an unknown society but nowhere have I ever learnt about how to react or mold oneself if s/he faces such barriers in the own home land. This very experience has come along as quite a shock. On one hand where it somehow shows that I have learnt something in Glasgow and have grasped what I intended to, while the other side of the coin depicts a fear of having changed my very identity and base. I am sure it’s just a matter of time and I should get back into the groove within weeks and then things would be as normal as they always were. Till then I guess the best I can do is enjoy being a foreigner in my own homeland.
