Nostalgia

The book is Ignorance by Yugaslovean author Milan Kundera. And the subject of the book is nostalgia. The word algia comes from algos which means pain. 

This nostalgia can be many times as bad as real physical pain. You are away from your home, from your people. You remember only happy memories and think that those days at home were so beautiful. Yearning to go back, but knowing too well that you can not, and little bit consoled by this, you are in really strange situation.

But one thing you do not apprehend is, the home is not what it was earlier. Place will be changed, people  have changed and so have you. The source of your nostalgia is no longer present.

This  story revolves around a woman who has emigrated to France from Yugoslavia because of communist misrule there. Now the country has given up communism, as other countries in the 90s decade. So it is safer to return. She remembers a poem where a poet  has quoted that he will wrap all his sadness around himself and go to sleep for 300 years.

I am not an emigre. I am in my own country, in my own state. People here do not speak a foreign tongue either. 

But I have always maintained that I am not Bangalorean. Proudly. And I never tried to blend in. But  I do not belong to my home town either. So where is my nostalgia directed to ? To Haliyal - where I spent my childhood? To Muscat - where I spent few years after marriage,  a small village near Karwar - where my ancestors lived? Or mother ship :)

" ಅಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮನೆ. ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಬಂದೆ ಸುಮ್ಮನೆ!" (My house is else where. I am a visitor here)