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Increasingly, when I’m asked what my native place is, I seem to find it difficult to reply with the same alacrity with which I used to before. I’ve always considered Chennai to be my native place for the simple reason that I was born there and I’ve spent at least 16 years (not continuously) in that city. But I’m increasingly having trouble with this geographical statistics approach to “native place”.

My father tried very hard to impress upon me that when I was asked for my ‘native’ place, I am to say ‘Gopalasamudram’, a sleepy hamlet not far away from Kanyakumari because that’s where several generations of his family came from. Barring the occasional summer holidays trip to that place, I have no emotional connections to that village. Unlike my cousins who are burdened with the lengthy name of that village in the first name column of their passport, I was fortunate to not have to explain to people why my name has ‘Gopalasamudram’ while I am not really from that place. The smaller the village of origin, the more likely it is to find itself the prefix to one’s name in Tamil Nadu.

But Chennai’s not that straightforward too, from a ‘native place’ perspective. The most formative years of my life were spent in Delhi (high school and college) and I even lived in Mumbai and Bangalore for longish periods of time. San Antonio, Texas, where I met my future wife, will always hold a special place in my heart, and now, I hold election ID cards in various airports around the world. It seems to me that geography has no effect on me. There’s nothing ‘Chennai’ about me, if that sort of a stereotype ever really existed outside Bollywood films in the first place. I am often told I don’t look like a Chennai-ite, as if there is this mythological boundary between the land of fair skinned Aryans and dark skinned fans of the cricketer nicknamed The Wall.

Leave aside geography, I’m having trouble when people ask me if I am ‘Tamil’. Yes, I speak that language, among a few other languages, and yes, it can be called my mother’s tongue, because she speaks it quite well, again, apart from other tongues.

My family’s genealogy chart tells me that some chap migrated from the Narmada valley 10 generations ago and settled down near Kanyakumari, so if languages, geography and a larger sense of history mattered, I’m more Maharashtrian than some of the goons who claim they are, in the name of petty politics. But that doesn’t make sense. I don’t speak Marathi.

I guess we are all still held in thrall by the burden of our history. Till very recently, most people never moved a few kilometres from their place of birth, so that sense of a ‘native place’ was always a strong and fundamental part of one’s identity. I grew up in a family that shifted thousands of kilometres every few years and in a world where national and state boundaries will increasingly not matter, if you ask me ‘where are you basically from?’, I can do no better than point to the roof above the bed that I last slept in.

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