How Does a City Become Home?

Surprise + Inevitability

I have been fascinated by the concept of home ever since I left Delhi. Since then I have lived and worked in innumerable cities. Some felt like home, others didn’t. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham says that every city whispers something. How? It whispers.

“A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It's not something you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off. One of the occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the conversations of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. But on average I'll take Cambridge conversations over New York or Silicon Valley ones.

A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping. At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure, it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among.”

Elizabeth Gilbert often says that great writing comes down to a combination of surprise and inevitability. I reckon a city becomes great (for you) when it makes everyday life surprising and inevitable. It helps if the city is run well and you feel that your tax dollars are getting utilized properly but even the most efficiently run city can feel foreign, distant, and dry if all it does is be efficient. In fact, people living in Delhi, Bangalore, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Calcutta and others will tell you over and over again how hard it is to live there. That said, they tend not to leave. That’s the pull of a great city that eventually becomes home. Just like great relationships, we complain about them but find them irresistible. That’s part of the charm, I reckon.

The ability to complain but not cancel; to banter; to know what to order at a local restaurant without having to look at the menu; the freedom to experiment… That’s when you know you are slowly building a home.