PUNE: Thirty-year-old Prabhakar Shankar had left his home in Kolkata around six years ago for work.
Shankar, an IT professional, who has stayed in different cities, the last being Pune for two years, returned home around two months ago for good after his company approved of him shifting and continuing work from home.
“It has been both weird and emotional for me to be back home again.
While I visited home frequently during holidays and occasions, staying there for a long time never really happened in the past six years.
Now that I am home and am expected to stay on for a long time, it is time to strengthen and renew relationships again with my immediate family and relatives,” he told TOI.
With the raging pandemic having destroyed many lives, it was a chance for many others to return home and reconnect with their immediate family members and friends.
Speaking to some among them, who had returned following a sudden sack or a massive pay cut, proved that staying at home after years of living in different cities was difficult but necessary and important.
“It has been 10 years since I left my home in Patna and went to Delhi for work.
From Delhi, work took me to different cities like Bengaluru, Cochin, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.
I was in Pune for the past two years but once the pandemic hit, I found myself to be suddenly jobless last year.
I had no choice but to return home and have been in Patna with my parents and my younger brother since last year.
Staying at home allowed me to reconnect with them, especially with my brother and his family.
Though I visited them on holidays and festivals and talked to them on phone, I feel that I had alienated myself and forgotten the meaning of a true bond,” Rajan Anand, who used to work in Pune as a marketing executive, told TOI.
Sachin Dhanawade, who returned to his home in Mumbai from Delhi after his company agreed to allow him to move and work from home, said that having home-cooked food was the best thing that had happened to him.
“I had been in Delhi for eight years when my company slashed our salaries heavily and I reached a situation where I was finding it difficult to even pay my house rent.
It is a relief that the company agreed to me moving home and continuing work from there,” Sachin, a call centre employee, pointed out.Aarti Marar, who has been living with her parents and sister since the past six months in Chandigarh after she left Pune, said that reconnecting with her sister had been a different experience altogether.
“I found her to be a changed person and she was nothing like what she was around six years ago when I had left home.
I had to leave Pune as had lost my job but now after being at home, I think I will stay on and find something here once things improve,” Marar, who was an HR executive for a Pune-based company, told TOI.