{"id":3139,"date":"2016-04-28T08:45:43","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T03:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=3139"},"modified":"2016-04-28T08:45:43","modified_gmt":"2016-04-28T03:15:43","slug":"study-abroad-moving-out-new-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=3139","title":{"rendered":"Delayed Teenage Crisis: What Moving Away From Home at 26 Taught Me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I<\/span>t was only 12 short months ago that I felt like a shiny new penny, all of 25 years of age. Time did its thing, and now, at 26, I\u2019m only going to be considered young if I were to drop dead or become the CEO of a company that makes Uber look like Uday Chopra\u2019s career. It\u2019s at this ripe <\/p>old age<\/span><\/a>, that I find myself leaving home for the first time, to go to university in faraway Ireland. I\u2019m at a juncture in my life where I\u2019m forced to confront the fact that I\u2019m basically a non-adult who has made his bed seven times in his entire life, who is going to a country no one I know of has visited for more than four days.<\/span>\n\nWhile my friends uprooted their lives in this manner at 18, or even as late as 22 or 23, my <\/span>quarter-life crisis <\/span><\/a>move makes me feel like a cross between two sorts of people: a child that\u2019s practising cutting vegetables, and an entry-level yuppie sage. <\/span>\n\nI do, after all, have four-ish years of full-time work experience, unlike the garden variety Indian <\/span>postgraduate<\/span><\/a>, who, at 22, is mostly a self-assured cretin with a degree that matters not one whit in the real world. I can\u2019t be sure of being smarter, but I can be sure of being wiser, from wear and tear and world-weariness, more commonly known as \u201cexperience\u201d.<\/span>\n\nIt\u2019s kinda hard for me come to terms with a fresh start at this age. For my entire\u00a02.6-ish decades of being, my centre has been a small, 20-kilometre stretch in Bombay. From Colaba to <\/span>Bandra <\/span><\/a>has been where I\u2019ve loved, lost, and even made attempts at semi-public lust. It\u2019s where I\u2019ve celebrated the things I achieved, and where I\u2019ve dejectedly shaken hands with failures no less than, well, Uday Chopra\u2019s career. <\/span>\n

Going back to the classroom as a more mature person who can make compelling arguments is also exciting.<\/blockquote>\nThis prolonged duration of being in (and from) one place comes with its own drawbacks. I\u2019m too attached to Bombay, a city that\u2019s still the dream destination for most of India. I\u2019m abandoning this particular <\/span>Titanic <\/span><\/i><\/a>while much of the young country aches for a ticket. It\u2019s stranger to do this at a later stage in life, and it\u2019s a sharper shock from the change when you live like a spoiled prince, who pays no rent, can\u2019t cook eggs without YouTube, and tries to intellectualise making a bed instead of just taking the minute to do it.<\/span>\n\nWith time, my bonds here have strengthened \u2013 with Bombay as a city, as well as my people here. It lends a definite, finite, and bittersweet quality to every damn interaction, and the toll it takes can be overwhelming. It hurts to visit a cafe you\u2019ve been visiting as a <\/span>teenager <\/span><\/a>and think it might be your last time there. Even buildings, architecture, and streets feel more evocative. Kala Ghoda isn\u2019t just a gorgeous historic neighbourhood for me now, it\u2019s also the location of an arts festival where I was a cinema volunteer for four years. Every fresh connection and break-up, every moment of conflict and camaraderie, echoes in your head like a Nashik dhol gong (Dubstep Remix) smacked by a baseball bat. <\/span>\n\nThe relentless passing of time has moved me from being someone who was aching to earn money and retire at 35, to an aspiring <\/span>copywriter<\/span><\/a>, to a journalism student who didn\u2019t quite make it as an assistant director, to a legit copywriter who freelances on the side to fuel his scuba diving habit. I\u2019ve lost hair, shed skins, and changed my mind and profession more times than should be legal.<\/span>\n\nAnd yet, nothing prepares you for the next level of change, where you\u2019ll be by yourself in a new country, cooking and cleaning and going to business school. To go from laadla beta to another brown person that stands out in a sea of white people, from wearing t-shirts to work to tucking in a self-ironed shirt before a presentation. Without the <\/span>homemade <\/span><\/a>food, without the friends and family and their familiarity, and most importantly, without jet spray, because Uday Chopra probably told them to use toilet paper.<\/span>\n\nYet, there\u2019s more than enough to look forward to. I hear cooking videos on YouTube are helpful, and as an ex-food-writer-who-only-ate, I almost have no choice but get behind the gas and dabble in baking, both things I\u2019ve wanted to do. Going back to the <\/span>classroom <\/span><\/a>as a more mature person who can make compelling arguments is also exciting. This, I think, will be a handy advantage I have over the younger \u2019uns, who spent their uprooting years being kids almost blindly bankrolled to get four years of first-world cushion. <\/span>\n\nAll that\u2019s left to do now is to dive into the deep end. Yet, in the moments before one jumps in, there\u2019s a feeling that almost freezes you solid to the ground. I know I\u2019ve got to move quickly, land right, and adapt to the water so I can keep swimming. Sinking, you see, is that one thing people who call <\/span>Bombay <\/span><\/a>home can\u2019t do.<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While my friends moved abroad to study at 18, I\u2019m leaving only at 26. Uprooting my life at 26 makes me feel like a cross between two kinds of people: a child that\u2019s practising cutting vegetables, and an entry-level yuppie sage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":3140,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[5101,983,6139,942,26,18,6140,2633,6141,5490,6142,5865,6143],"class_list":["post-3139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pov","tag-adult","tag-bombay","tag-brown-kids","tag-child","tag-cinema","tag-family","tag-foreign","tag-indian-parents","tag-ireland","tag-moving-out","tag-new-city","tag-problems","tag-studying-abroad"],"yoast_head":"\nDelayed Teenage Crisis: What Moving Away From Home at 26 Taught Me<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"While my friends moved abroad to study at 18, I\u2019m leaving only at 26. 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