Lately I have been thinking a lot about roots. What are they really? Do they strengthen us or hold us back? Do they enrich the quality of our lives or quietly limit the paths we could have taken? The idea has been sitting with me for weeks, maybe months, and I can feel myself returning to it again and again.

I am Bengali. The first 21 years of my life were spent in Calcutta. My childhood, my teens, my earliest memories, my closest friends, every festival, every milestone, everything begins and ends with that city. When someone asks, “Which is your city?”, the answer comes out immediately. It will always be Calcutta. Amar Shohor. My city.

For more than two decades now, I have lived in Delhi and Gurgaon. It is where my adulthood began. It is where I built my career. It is where I found my wife and where my two children were born. I have also been fortunate to experience the warmth of my wife’s large and inclusive family. She is from UP but has lived in Delhi since birth. Our intercultural marriage has created a home that holds the best of both worlds. I often think of myself as someone who now carries two emotional geographies, one inherited and one built over time.

The question remains. How relevant are roots in shaping the quality of a life?

I have seen many people in my family who are deeply rooted in Calcutta and cannot imagine living anywhere else. They love the city, the culture, the rhythm and familiarity of daily life, the emotional comfort that comes from knowing every corner and every season. They may have stepped away from more lucrative opportunities but remained anchored in a place that feels undeniably theirs. Some of my closest friends from childhood never left the city. They chose steadiness over movement. I sometimes wonder if that was a lack of ambition or simply a clear understanding of what mattered most to them.

My move to Delhi happened for very different reasons. I lost my father at 21 and my mother many years before that. My emotional world felt unstable and Delhi became less a strategic career choice and more an escape. The irony is that this escape became the foundation for everything meaningful I built later. Life has a way of taking you where you need to go even when the path is shaped by loss or uncertainty.

So what exactly creates a sense of rootedness? Is it the city? Is it the people who once lived there with you? Or is it the memories that hold you with their quiet and persistent pull?

For me, Calcutta is an anchor. I return during festivals, during long weekends, during emotionally heavy times, and during moments when I want to feel like myself again. A part of me remains parked there, untouched by the passing years. Even if I travel the world or settle somewhere entirely new, a piece of my heart will always wait in Calcutta.

I am beginning to feel that being rooted and having roots are two different things. Being rooted might keep you in one place both physically and mentally. Having roots gives you an emotional home, a north star, an anchor you can return to whenever life becomes noisy or confusing.

The closest analogy I can think of is how adults live their independent lives yet know they can always return to their parents’ home. It is the place where they can be vulnerable or imperfect and still be completely accepted. Calcutta feels like that for me. A warm emotional refuge that expects nothing and gives everything.

Perhaps that is the purpose of roots. Not to hold us down. Not to restrict movement. Not to dictate where we live. Their purpose might simply be to give us the reassurance that wherever we go, there is a place in the world where we still belong.

I may not know if being rooted is universally good. Having roots, however, feels like one of life’s greatest blessings.