“Main udna chahta hoon, daudna chahta hoon… bas rukna nahi chahta.”
That was my mantra. Chicago was the endgame, and that plane ticket was my passport to freedom.
I built the life I wanted: professional travel videographer, hiking through Europe, catching Paris sunsets on film. I got everything I chased. But movies edit out the aftermath. They don’t show you the hidden invoice of the dream – the one you only discover when you’re standing in a cold, quiet kitchen halfway across the world, wondering what you left behind to get here.
I remember the first time I stood at the international terminal. It’s a stage for a very specific brand of Indian ambition. You see it at the check-in counters: mothers frantically rearranging packets of theplas to save a suitcase from a three-kilo penalty; fathers repeating “call karna pahunch ke” because they don’t have the words for the hollow feeling in their chests.
In our world, we treat the visa as the victory lap. But after years of crossing borders, I’ve realized that the boarding pass is the easiest part of the journey. The real cost isn’t the one you see on a bank statement. The real cost is the quiet, daily tax on your spirit that no one warns you about.
The high price of “Making It”
We talk about the ROI of a degree in terms of future salaries, but my first year was paid for in adjustments. I went from a home where my needs were anticipated to a city that didn’t even know my name.
There is a specific, lonely kind of exhaustion that comes from realizing you have to learn how to exist before you can learn how to excel. That independence my friends back home envied? It was often just a polite word for the silence you face at 2:00 AM when a pipe freezes, or the grocery budget runs thin, and there is no one to call but yourself.
When you’re building everything from scratch, your routines, your support system, your sense of direction, there is almost no bandwidth left to simply pause and breathe. Mental health quietly slides to the bottom of the to-do list, squeezed out by deadlines and survival logistics, until the weight of neglecting it becomes its own emergency.
Setting up life abroad without a ready circle of family or friends is genuinely hard, not a personal failing. Everything, from finding a doctor to figuring out where to buy groceries, is a problem you solve alone, usually while tired.
The weight of the ₹40 lakh ghost
Let’s be honest about the number: ₹40 lakhs. That figure doesn’t stay in the bank; it follows you into the lecture hall. It sits there when you’re deciding if you can afford a coffee with classmates, and it’s there when you’re working your third shift of the week at a part-time job.
Foreign is expensive in ways that are easy to underestimate from home: rent, groceries, transport, the surprise medical co-pay, and the gap between what you budgeted and what you actually need can be quietly crushing.
Back home, that money represents more than just a loan. It was my father’s retirement fund. It was his “we’ll manage” smile. When things got brutal, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. Like so many others, I settled for a strained “Haan papa, sab theek hai” over a grainy video call. I realized then that I wasn’t just carrying a backpack. I was carrying his peace of mind.
Missing the context of home
The hardest part of moving abroad isn’t the winter or the food, though the food is genuinely, achingly hard. There are evenings when you would trade almost anything for a plate your mother made, or just the smell of a particular dal on the stove. You find yourself watching a Bollywood film alone on a Tuesday night not because you particularly love the film, but because it is the closest thing to home that you have on hand.
What truly unsettles you, though, is the sudden loss of context. Back in India, I was Bunny, the guy with the big dreams and the local reputation. Abroad, I was just a profile, a visa status, and a student ID.
Diwali would come around, and I’d be in a silent room watching diyas being lit thousands of miles away through a buffering screen. You feel, in a way that is difficult to articulate, like an outsider, not because anyone has been unkind, but because the invisible social fabric that makes a place feel like yours takes years to weave, and you are starting from nothing.
Even the mundane feels alienating: official university communications arrive in a new language, lecture announcements are posted without translation, and a casual hallway conversation can leave you nodding along while only catching every third word. The language barrier is not just a classroom problem. It is a daily low-grade friction that never fully goes away.
Finding your worth when no one knows your story, when you aren’t the main character of the city anymore, is the most unglamorous, yet transformative, part of the process. Homesickness is not a phase you move through quickly. It is a background hum that rises and falls, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than pushed down.
Beyond the highlight reel
So, is the leap still worth it? If you’re looking for the 120-minute movie version where everything is perfect, perhaps not. My journey wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t always pretty. But if you’re looking for the kind of resilience that only grows when your safety net is stripped away, then yes.
There are plenty of people who can help you with the mechanics: the lenders, the applications, the paperwork. But take it from me: don’t go because you think the flight is the finish line. Go because you are ready to be uncomfortable. Go because you want to build a version of yourself that can thrive when nothing feels familiar, when you don’t understand the language on the notice board, when you can’t call anyone at midnight, when you are craving something that simply doesn’t exist in the country you’re standing in.
Just make sure that when you board that plane, you aren’t just chasing an Instagram highlight. You’re going to find out who you really are when the camera isn’t rolling.
