Growing up in an Indian household, love is everywhere, you can feel it in the food kept warm until you got home late, in the sweaters slipped into your bag before a trip, in the dreams they quietly gave up so yours could live. Parents here don’t just raise you, they pour themselves into you. But that same love, as selfless as it is, often carries another side. It becomes so protective that it starts to feel like overprotection, arms holding on so tightly they forget you need space to breathe. What begins as care turns slowly into caution, and the home that once felt safest can, at times, feel like a place that doesn’t let you step beyond its walls.
It shows up in the smallest ways. The sigh that slips out when we mention studying abroad. The gentle but heavy, “Why do you need to go so far?” The story about someone else’s child who left and “changed.” On the surface, these are words of love, words that sound like concern. But beneath them is something harder to name, fear. Fear that distance will loosen bonds. Fear that ambition will wash away sanskaar. Fear that roots will be forgotten if we step too far beyond the familiar. And so, the love that once gave us wings sometimes becomes the very thing that keeps us tied down.
Even if you’ve never sat through the film Baaghban, you’ve probably lived in its shadow. It told the story of parents who poured everything into their children, only to be left behind when those children grew up. That story struck so deeply that it stopped being just a movie, it became a reference point, a warning parents could invoke without saying much at all. It gave shape to their deepest worry: that if children leave, they won’t come back. That if children dream too far, they’ll forget where they came from. Without meaning to, the story slipped into our everyday lives, making ambition look like betrayal and independence feel like selfishness.
And for us, the children, that leaves behind guilt. Every dream of moving out, moving away, moving higher comes with the heaviness of what it might do to the people who raised us. Choices stop being only about our own desires and start being about who they might hurt. Our parents don’t often tell us to let go of our ambitions, they don’t have to. Their love is so intense, so protective that the thought of letting them down feels unbearable. So little by little, we fold our wings before we’ve even learned how far they could take us.
We’re raised with values, respect, duty, family first. These are grounding, beautiful things, but sometimes they blur into something else. They stop guiding and start binding. And we begin to wonder: is it really betrayal to want to explore more? To take a step into the unknown? To build a path that looks different from the one imagined for us? Our parents see risk where we see possibility. They want safety, but safety rarely leads to discovery. And yet, over and over again, we choose safety, not for ourselves, but for them.
That’s the paradox of our generation: we love them so much that we start protecting them, even from our own dreams. We carry guilt we shouldn’t have to carry, not from neglect, but from wanting more. And maybe the shift begins when we remind ourselves, and remind them too, that distance doesn’t mean forgetting. That ambition doesn’t mean abandonment. And that love was never meant to be a debt we spend our lives repaying.
Love, in its truest form, isn’t a leash. It’s the wind that lets us rise, trusting that no matter how far we go, we’ll always know the way back home.
If this article feels like home, you’ll definitely find comfort in my piece Her Silent Battles Light My Way…Guiding Me Through Each New Day on Her Campus at MUJ.