This month, I find myself speaking at two literary festivals in Kerala – at the Kerala LitFest on Kozhikode Beach and then at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Literature, of which I am patron, in my own constituency, Thiruvananthapuram. These settings, one steeped in the timeless serenity of Kerala’s heartland, the other in bustle of the state capital, compels a consideration of what truly constitutes home. For a writer, home is often an architecture of the mind, a sanctuary constructed from language and memory. But for one whose life has been a relentless, decades-long trajectory across continents and across the fraught divide of global service and local politics, the question of where the heart truly resides is far less simple.

For me, ‘home’ is a term that has undergone an essential, sometimes unsettling, metamorphosis. It is not a static point on a map, but a dynamic, evolving commitment—a concept that has stretched from the abstract universality of a global ideal to the profound, tangible particularity of a constituency in Thiruvananthapuram. It is, ultimately, a magnificent synthesis of the three vital pillars of our existence: People, Places, and Planet.

My initial, protracted definition of home was the Planet itself. For twenty-nine years, my allegiance was pledged to the ideals of the United Nations. In the grand, sprawling, and often frustrating theatre of global diplomacy, my identity was that of the global citizen. My ‘Place’ was less a fixed location than a succession of temporary outposts: Geneva, Singapore, New York, and a dizzying inventory of conflict zones and suffering nations. My daily life was an exercise in transcending national........

© Mathrubhumi English