Chennai at 16: leaving home to find myself

The platform announcement was in a language I didn’t speak. I was sixteen, standing on a station in Chennai with one steel trunk, a paper full of an address I couldn’t pronounce, and the specific, hollow confidence of a boy who has not yet learned what he doesn’t know.

I had left a small town in the Northeast — not Bangalore, not Delhi, the places ambitious kids were supposed to flee to. Chennai. Roughly 2,500 kilometres from a house where my grandparents had raised me, where everyone knew which family I came from, where the worst thing that could happen to me was being recognised. I had chosen the opposite of all that on purpose. I wanted to go somewhere nobody knew my name.

I told everyone it was about education, opportunity, the future. That was the respectable version. The honest version was simpler and more selfish: I wanted to find out who I was when no one was watching.

The fantasy of independence

Here is what nobody tells a sixteen-year-old about leaving home: the part you’re chasing — freedom — arrives instantly, and the part that actually matters — competence — does not.

The freedom hits the moment the train pulls out. No one to ask where you’re going. No one waiting up. You can eat what you like, sleep when you like, walk into the night and back, and the universe doesn’t send a single notification to anyone who loves you. For about a week, this is intoxicating.

Then the second envelope opens. The one with rent in it. With I don’t know how this city’s buses work in it. With I am cold and it is 11 p.m. and there is no grandmother in this building in it. Independence, it turns out, is not a feeling you’re given. It’s a bill you didn’t know you’d signed up to pay.

I thought independence was being free from people who took care of me. It was actually becoming the person who takes care of me.

That gap — between the freedom I got on day one and the competence I had to earn over the next several years — is the whole story. It’s also, I’d later realise, the gap that runs underneath almost every change any of us tries to make. We get the idea of the new life instantly. The ability to live it shows up much, much later, and only if we keep paying.

What it actually cost

Let me not romanticise this. Leaving at sixteen cost me things, and I’d be lying to you — and dishonouring a younger me who deserved better — if I pretended it was all noble self-discovery.

It cost me years of small, ordinary closeness with the grandparents who raised me. You don’t get those back. You call, you visit, you send money later when you have it, and none of it refills the jar of mundane evenings you traded away to go become yourself somewhere else.

It cost me a kind of belonging I have spent the rest of my life half-looking for. When you choose a city precisely because no one knows you, you also discover what it is to be a stranger every single day — to be the one whose accent is wrong, whose food is unfamiliar, who has to consciously learn the rules everyone around him absorbed in childhood. My later curiosity about anthropology, about how differently people see the world — I think it was born on those Chennai streets, in the specific loneliness of being the outsider who had to pay attention to survive.

And it cost me my illusions about myself, which — for the record — was the only cost that turned out to be a refund.

The comfort zone has a door, and it only opens out

Back home, I had been a bit of a “chief destruction officer.” I was the kid who took broken things apart to see how they worked, who once experimented with fire badly enough to burn down the bamboo-and-tin house we lived in. (My family has, miraculously, mostly forgiven me.) I was curious, restless, allergic to being managed. The small town loved me and also slightly contained me, the way a town that knows your whole family always will.

Growth, I now believe, lives just outside the comfort zone — and the comfort zone is comfortable precisely because nothing is asked of you there. The price of growth is discomfort. There’s no version where you get the second without paying the first. Chennai was me pre-paying, all at once, at sixteen, more discomfort than I knew how to budget for.

What I’d tell that boy on the platform — and what I try to tell my own kids now — is that the discomfort isn’t the obstacle to the growth. It is the growth. The fear in your stomach as the train pulls away isn’t a sign you’ve made a mistake. It’s the toll on the only road that goes anywhere new.

From effort to effortless — the long way round

Everything I write about now circles back to one idea: how we move from effort to effortless. How the right thing can be made the easy thing.

Chennai was the most expensive, least efficient possible version of that lesson. Independence at sixteen was pure effort — every meal, every rupee, every navigated street was a deliberate, draining act of will. Nothing was effortless. For years.

But here’s what that brutal, friction-heavy education bought me: a baseline. A version of “hard” so high that most of what came afterward — running small businesses through college, building products, raising a family in cities that weren’t mine either — sat below that line. I’d already paid the steepest entry fee. The competence I’d ground out the painful way eventually became the thing I no longer had to think about. The effort, repeated enough times, had quietly turned effortless. That’s the trade the comfort zone never offers you, because it never charges you anything.

I don’t recommend my exact path. Sixteen is young, the cost was real, and I got lucky in ways I had no right to count on. But I’d make the trade again. Because the alternative — staying somewhere safe, known, and slightly too small — costs you something too. It just sends the bill later, and quietly, and you never get to see the line items.

If you’re standing on some platform of your own right now, paper in hand, language you don’t speak announcing over your head — the fear is not a warning. It’s the fare. Pay it. The freedom comes free and fast. The person who can actually carry that freedom takes years, and is built only out of the discomfort you were brave enough not to refuse.

I’m still building him. I’m not arrived; I’m still travelling — which, given how this all started, feels about right.