Bright Lights

Srishti Mukherjee had always wanted to get out of Calcutta and explore the world. The chance came in her 18th year, right after school, when higher studies took her to OP Jindal Law School in Sonepat. Just two-and-a-half months away from family now, Srishti is revelling in the fun, freedom and responsibility of campus life. “Things change entirely when you live on your own. You have to fall back on yourself or your friends for everything,” she says. At the same time as Srishti moved northwards, Delhiite Priya Raj went south to study print and media technology in Manipal University. She calls it a “life-changing event”. There’s of course the heady independence and lack of restrictions (“You can let your room remain dirty, can party till late”) but there’s also a flip side to being on her own: missing home and parents, more so home-cooked food. “We had heard about the watery dal and sand-like rotis of the mess. Now we have to actually eat those,” she says.

Eighteen is the age when most Indian kids like Srishti and Priya—supposedly some of the most cosseted in the world—move out of the comfort and security of their families and face the world for the first time. Mostly while in pursuit of higher studies. It’s the age for finding a home away from home and it alters things irrevocably, for them and for their parents as well. Nishu Kaul, 26, programme officer, gender and governance at PRIA (Participatory Research in Asia), who left home in Jammu at 18 to study in Delhi, calls it a “learning and unlearning experience”. For the kids it’s all about finding themselves away from home and learning to sustain themselves as adults. “Your overall development can’t happen with parents around you,” says Priya, quite categorically. It’s about getting to learn all the things that’ll matter in life—from managing money to living with another person.

Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari

You can’t grow into your own self under the protection of your parents.... I learnt to deal with things and take on the world, figure out who I am and what I wanted to be.”

Himel Sarkar 20

Himel Sarkar, 20, a second year student of engineering at Delhi’s Indraprastha University, who came from Jamshedpur two years ago, agrees with Priya. “You can’t grow into your own self under the protection of your parents,” he says. After school, he dropped a year and came to Delhi to prepare for engineering. In the process he also got a prep course on life. “I learnt to deal with things and take on the world, figure out who I am and what I wanted to be.”

Much like him, Gaurav Kumar, 20, a second year English Hons student at Delhi’s Kirori Mal College, moved from Bihar after Plus-II because back home there was a lack of good educational opportunities. He looks back on it as a “double alienation”. “I was alone and in a strange city,” he says. Small things like waking up early, keeping the room tidy seemed huge issues in the beginning but gradually he learnt to plan his day, spend time with himself. He calls it the decision that helped him “construct myself without the help of others”. But responsibility, freedom and self-realisation are not all. It also opens the window to the world, exposes individuals to other cultures. “I have made friends from all over the country,” says Srishti.

For parents, it’s to do with adjusting to the empty nest when the fulcrum of their lives goes away. Sahima Dutta, ex-bureaucrat and now a security consultant, still remembers the date, Aug­ust 22, 2013, when she left her son Reu­­ben, who turns 18 this coming February in Boston to pursue a course in liberal arts. “Reuben is my only child, so I was initially apprehensive,” she says. But the fact that she herself moved out of home at 18 helped her see things from a higher ground. Sahima had travelled from Assam to Delhi for studies in 1985. It was the time when insurgency was at its peak and education at its nadir back home. “For me, Delhi was a big jump that got me succ­ess and happiness,” she recalls. No wonder then that she wanted Reuben also to take his own leap, “to experience global cultural diversity and go to one of the best academic institutes, one that nurtured creative thinking and not rote learning”.

Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee

Things change entirely when you live on your own. You have to fall back on yourself or your friends for everything. A big plus is that now I have friends from all over the country.”

Srishti Mukherjee 18

For people like Sahima, time has helped bring in a better perspective. You can look back and understand the metamorphosis at 18 much better now than when you were in the throes of it. As in the case of Neha Simlai, 29, who works in the development sector. In her case, the severing of the umbilical cord happened for an atypical reason. “My parents were contemplating a separation and I didn’t want to be pulled from either side,” she recalls. She continued to stay in her hometown Lucknow but moved in with a close friend. “It was instinctive, jawani ka josh, but I knew I had to fly out of the nest,” she says. She feels that over the years that one decision has made her what she is: completely self-sufficient. “It’s easier for me to take strong decisions,” she says. Be it a divorce after four years of marriage or opting to work in the development sector, which pays a pittance.

Theatreperson Sukesh Arora, 42, left home at 18 as a sheer act of rebellion, because his mother objected to the fact that he had brought home a woman friend. “I packed my bags and moved out in 48 hours,” he recalls. He likes to think of the rough and tumble in the next many years as a “rite of passage” that everyone should go through. “It toughens you enough to commit to a course of action, however difficult it may be,” he says.

“It turned me from a child into a full person,” says artist and filmmaker Junuka Deshpande, 31, who left home at 18 to study in NID Ahmed­a­bad. “When away from home, you have to take full responsibility for everything you do and that moulds you in a peculiar way. You grow up when still grappling with childhood. This process helped me become self-aware, creative. You start trusting your decisions. They may be totally wrong at times but it is a wonderful feeling to trust the self and to be able to solve things. It also helps one find one’s own beliefs, values, rather than obligations,” she says.

Stepping out can also change the destiny of an entire community and help it find a new direction in the long run. Shefalika Shekhar, who teaches Hindi at Venkateshwara College, moved from Madhepura to Delhi in 2001, her first ever experience of the city. While the immediate family was supportive, extended family and friends were hesitant, some downright disapproving. “At the time, never in my wildest of dreams could I have imagined about studying and teaching in DU or being the V-P of jnusu,” she says. Being the first among the girls in the district to venture out, she influenced others as well. “When I went home after my first year in Delhi, girls from the neighbourhood used to come and ask me about my experiences,” she says. Their hesitation to leave home vanished with her success.

But things aren’t always rosy. “Often there is no one to confide in, which you need in those years,” says Himel. But most agree that the positives far outwe­igh the negatives. “When you move out early, you also let go of the core of a lot of relationships. If you move out in the late 20s or 30s it’s less easy to manoeuvre and mould your life,” says Neha.

And once you have flown out, there is mostly no going back. “It gets disorienting to even go back during holidays because one is still treated like a child at home,” says Gaurav. However Junuka, who has been away for more than 10 years now, finds that though she can’t not live independently now, “it is becoming easier and easier to return to parents on an emotional level”.