Home Again: Finding Identity in India's Forgotten Ideals

Two weeks ago, I found myself seated at the Stanford India Conference, unsure why I had come. Billed as the largest gathering on the U.S.-India strategic partnership on the West Coast, it showcased India's "astonishing growth" and its projected rise as the world's third-largest economy by 2030. The room buzzed with elite members of the Indian diaspora—venture capitalists boasting they contribute "six percent of U.S. taxes," tech executives toggling between Silicon Valley and Bengaluru, and policy wonks forecasting India’s geopolitical ascent.

I had told myself it would be interesting, maybe even hopeful. But the moment Arnab Goswami appeared—virtually, of course, since the recent Pahalgam attack had given him a new wave to ride—I knew I had made a mistake. Panel after panel spoke not of mourning, but of missiles. Not of democracy, but dominance. The mood was electric with anticipation. Retaliation wasn't a question—it was the point.

Ironically, the video of the conference is now posted online (here)—but Goswami’s incendiary keynote has been muted. I suppose even the organizers found his speech a bit too candid. Or maybe it hit too close to the truth.

Then came today. Operation Sindoor. Nine sites bombed across the border. Social media is lighting up in celebration. News anchors foam. Messages in WhatsApp groups pour in: "Finally showing them." "This is the new India." "What a wonderful news to wake up to."

I sit alone with my phone, thousands of miles away, realizing the distance between me and home has become not just geographical, but moral. It's not just that I left; it's that the country I left behind is becoming a stranger to me. That split perspective—the immigrant’s double vision—hits hard. Between memories and rhetoric, I feel unsteady, unsure where I belong. This growing distance is not just physical but represents a deeper transformation in how I understand my homeland and myself.

I. The Transformation of Distance

Each year, the flight home feels longer—not in hours, but in emotional distance. The rituals remain—flights booked, bags packed, old neighborhoods visited. But each year, they feel more performative, more hollow, as if I’m returning not to a place, but to a ghost. Familiar streets are still there, the food still tastes delightful—but the tone has shifted.

The India of my childhood grows blurry with every headline, every military strike celebrated like a cricket win. It's not the danger that unsettles me—it’s the applause. The ease with which violence becomes pride. The way fear gets repackaged as strength, and cruelty slips by as common sense.

We used to speak of pluralism. Of democracy as a messy, living experiment. It was imperfect, but it was ours. The India I built in my mind rested on those foundations, not on geography, but on values that transcended borders.

Credit: Jack Zalium (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Now the conversation is about power. About punishing enemies and silencing dissent in the name of unity. If you don’t fall in line, you don’t belong. For someone straddling multiple identities, this narrowing cuts deep.

This isn’t just India—it’s everywhere. Strength is now sold as virtue, compassion dismissed as naïveté. We’ve come to believe peace requires conquest, and security demands submission. It’s a poverty of imagination—the refusal to envision justice without violence, or belonging without exclusion.

Perhaps there was genuine hope in the nineties—when India globalized its economy and traded principle for prosperity—that we might humanize global capitalism, bring a new moral language to world politics. But instead, India is capitulating to the very powers she once resisted: eager to impress, willing to comply, desperate to belong.

I've built a life in America believing I might return someday—like Shah Rukh Khan in Swades—to help build the India I once believed in. But now I watch India imitate the empires she once defied. We condemn their wars, then define ourselves by their weapons.

What’s the point of “arrival” on the world stage if the cost is our collective soul? If the India that once stood for moral courage is traded for spectacle?

For those of us who built our identity on ideals, not land, this feels like losing our home twice. The dream of return begins to dissolve, as the place I long for becomes more memory than reality.

II. Finding Home in Forgotten Ideals

Here’s the paradox: the more India changes, the more I hold to what it once taught me. When you leave the soil that raised you, you carry it differently—not as territory, but as ideals. Not as land, but as language. For years, I’ve lived in this in-between space—too Indian for America, too American for India. But in that limbo, I found something liberating: the freedom to choose which parts of my heritage would define me.

In losing physical belonging, I’ve had to construct a homeland out of principles. I’ve had to ask: what parts of India will I carry forward? What’s worth preserving when the soil itself has changed? The India I loved wasn’t built on bombs or borders. It was built on a belief: that differences could be held, not crushed. That justice wasn’t a zero-sum game. That freedom without compassion is just dominance by another name. These are the treasures I’ve carried in exile.

I chose not the nationalism or the noise, but Gandhi’s quiet rebellion. Not geopolitics, but Ambedkar’s radical vision of justice. In the same way that for me, America is represented by Lincoln, Emerson, and Dewey—not by Trump, Bush, or Obama—I chose to define my Indian identity through figures who embodied the values I cherish. These weren’t just historical figures—they became my compass when belonging turned abstract. Their ideas became home: that strength lies in restraint, that power protects rather than dominates, that our greatness is measured by how we treat the most vulnerable.

Credit: Abhi Sharma (CC BY 2.0)

And behind their great deeds, I came to see a deeper thread—one Gandhi openly acknowledged: the teachings of Jesus. Gandhi read the Sermon on the Mount daily. Ambedkar, too, pointed toward a radical transformation of the heart. Ambedkar understood that caste, like hate, endures not only in structures but in spirit. Real change, he taught, begins in the heart. In their own ways, they echoed that most difficult commandment: love your enemies. Not with passivity, but with moral courage. Not through submission, but through a defiant compassion that exposes injustice without replicating it.

I once believed in an India that stood for these values—an India that couldn’t be reduced to power metrics or strategic alliances. A country held together not by fear, but by a fragile, shared hope. Through the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar dared to enshrine dignity as a matter of justice, not concession—a vision that demanded not just reform, but inner transformation. That same strength defined our freedom movement: not vengeance, but dignity. Not domination, but love strong enough to endure suffering without becoming cruel.

These ideals have become more precious to me precisely as they've receded from the headlines. As the gap between my remembered India and today's reality widens, I've come to understand that preserving these values might be the most important work I can do—not just for my own sense of identity, but as an act of witness to what might still be possible.

III. Looking Forward

I remain Indian in my heart. But the India I love now feels like a memory. And so my exile deepens—not just physical, but spiritual. I mourn not just what India is becoming, but what it has forgotten it once dared to be.

Still, there’s a strange strength in rootlessness. Home isn’t just where we’re born—it’s what we embody. For me, being Indian means carrying forward the best of what India offered the world: the courage to love difference, to protect the vulnerable, to imagine justice.

I hold out hope—not for a return, but a reawakening. For an India that finds strength not in fear, but in faith. Not in vengeance, but in vision. Not in proving itself, but in remembering itself.

Until then, I’ll make my home in these forgotten ideals. I will be the India I no longer see—through how I live, how I love, how I resist. Maybe that’s the immigrant’s purpose: not just to survive in foreign lands, but to preserve what’s worth saving when the homeland forgets.

As I write, Michael Kiwanuka’s voice drifts through my apartment: “Home again, home again, one day…” But home isn’t measured in miles. It’s in remembering, preserving, becoming. For those of us between worlds, home is not a return—it’s what we carry forward.