Seene mein jalan, Aakhon mein toofan... the Train we are not able to board ....

The airport goodbyes are always the worst. As my parents left me at Surat airport after two days together, I felt that familiar weight settle in - the one that doesn't lift even as you go through security, board the plane, try to distract yourself. By the time I settled into my seat on the Frankfurt flight from Delhi, the thoughts had only gotten denser.

I started browsing the entertainment system as the plane took off, and that's when I watched Gaman, Muzaffar Ali's 1978 directorial debut. I'd been meaning to watch it for years for it's actors and its songs, Aap ki yaad aati rahi raat bhar and Seene mein jalan, Aakhon mein toofan, and then it was something about that very moment - suspended between two worlds at 35,000 feet - made it feel like the right time. Or maybe the worst time. I'm still not sure.

When a Film Becomes a Mirror

The movie opens with such earthiness, such raw authenticity, that you're immediately transported. Fresh faces then - Farooque Shaikh, Smita Patil, Jalal Agha, Gita Sidharth - bringing to life a story that touches something achingly universal: the gap between ambition and belonging, between what we pursue and what we leave behind.

Ghulam, the protagonist, leaves his village for Mumbai, leaving behind his young wife Khairun and aging mother. He goes with hope, with dreams of earning enough to build a better life. Sound familiar? It's the story of economic migration we all know - village to city, country to country, roots left behind for the promise of something better.

But here's what the film captures so rawly: this isn't just about economics. It's about emotional arithmetic that never, ever balances.

The Arithmetic That Never Adds Up

I watched Ghulam struggle in Mumbai - working hard, trying to save, always planning to return or at least send money back. His wife's letters keep coming: "I don't like this, I'm scared, mother is sick and needs you." But he can't come. Not yet. Not until he's earned enough. Except "enough" keeps moving further away.

For many of us living abroad, Ghulam's dilemma isn't a plot point - it's our life. We left to create something "better," but better itself becomes questionable depending on what you measure it against. Better salary? Sure. Better opportunity? Maybe. Better than being there for aging parents whose days are finite and whose needs are present, not future? That's where the equation collapses.

You move with the intention of earning enough to visit often, to support them, to fulfill your duties from a distance. But despite how much you earn - and for many of us, it's never quite enough - you keep grinding, and the visits remain too brief, too infrequent. Time constraints, affordability, work commitments - there's always a reason. But you started this journey believing you'd do better than this.

And so you're caught. You're living in hope while they're living with your absence. When you do visit for a day or two, they take care of you with such perfection, such love - which only makes the contrast more excruciating. The longing in their eyes, the unspoken questions: "Will you stay? When will you come back?" And you feel it, that sense of betrayal. Maybe that's too harsh a word, but it conveys something real, even if extreme.

The Questions That Won't Let Go

So which grass was actually greener - the village or the city, home or abroad? Except that metaphor fails here, doesn't it? We're not comparing two static landscapes. We're comparing a life being built against lives drawing to their close. That changes everything.

What is the right thing to do? I've wrestled with this question more times than I can count, and I'm not sure I'm any closer to an answer. But I've found some ways to think about it that help, even if they don't solve anything.

First, it's worth remembering: our parents likely made similar impossible choices in their time. They perhaps left their villages for cities, chose careers over extended family time, made their own trade-offs between generations. The pain we feel - that acute awareness of their longing, their aging, the way they go all out to care for us during brief visits - this very pain might be what redeems our choice from being an actual betrayal. We haven't forgotten. We haven't stopped feeling. We're caught in this web precisely because we remain connected to both sides of it.

Second, maybe the "right thing" is a false quest altogether. There may be no right thing, only an honest reckoning with what we're living. I've seen people in our position return permanently and find peace; I've seen others find resentment. I've seen people stay abroad and manage the guilt; I've seen others haunted by it for decades. The question isn't which grass is greener but what you can live with, what allows you to look at yourself clearly.

Third - and this has helped me most - perhaps the way forward is abandoning the search for a solution that erases the pain. Instead, ask: given this situation with no perfect answer, what can I do that honors both the life I've built and the people who made it possible? More frequent shorter visits instead of rare longer ones? Some friends swear by this. Bringing parents over for extended periods? Creating rituals of connection that transcend physical presence - daily calls, video chats, being present even when not physically present? Building toward a future where you can be more available, whether that means restructuring work, relocating eventually, or something else entirely?

And here's something I'm learning: their perfected care during visits - that's their love language, their way of saying "we're glad you came, we understand the life you're living." The pain I feel is mine to carry, but perhaps also to share with them honestly, not as confession but as connection.

The Film's Brutal Honesty

But back to Gaman, because it haunted me for days afterward, raising questions I'm still processing. The film doesn't offer easy consolations, and maybe that's why it stays with you.

Take the cruel irony at its heart: Ghulam leaves Khairun behind thinking it will protect their future, give them a chance. Meanwhile, his friend Lallu and Lallu's love Yashodhara are in the same city, can actually see each other, and yet are just as separated - by economics, by caste barriers, by the city's grinding indifference. Physical proximity means nothing when poverty swallows everything, even the possibility of being together.

Then Lallu pays the ultimate price for trying to protect his love. The film doesn't even give his death much ceremony—he's just gone, reduced to taxi number 4143 in a radio announcement. The city moves on. That anonymity—"vo kaun tha? kahan ka tha? kya hua tha use?" - the very question they'd asked about someone else's death earlier in the film, now applies to Lallu himself.

What's so gutting is that these weren't people destroyed by their own failings or bad choices. They were kind, loyal, hardworking. Lallu was generous to a fault. And none of it mattered. The system - the rural landlords who cheat them out of land, the urban structures that keep them perpetually precarious, the caste barriers, the economic violence of it all - just grinds them down regardless.

The Friendship That Survived

If there's one thing in the film that isn't compromised, it's the friendship between Lallu and Ghulam. Separated by religion, caste, background, but bound by the common grammar of poverty and displacement. Lallu has almost nothing, lives in a jhuggi that could be demolished any day, and yet he opens his home, teaches Ghulam to navigate the city, shares what little he has without question or calculation.

That's real friendship - not the kind built on leisure or shared prosperity, but on shared struggle. Everything else in the film - love, duty, hope, ambition - all of it is twisted by circumstance into something painful. But their friendship remained pure even as everything around them failed.

The film shows you can do everything "right" - work hard, stay loyal, love deeply - and still lose. That's not cynicism; that's just honesty about what structural inequality does to human lives. Muzaffar Ali didn't flinch from showing that.

The Platform

But the most haunting part was the ending. Ghulam stands at the station, finally able to go home, finally with the means to board that train. And he doesn't. He can't. He just stands there as the train pulls away. I found this devastating precisely because it defies the emotional logic we've been following the entire film. We expect catharsis, reunion, resolution. Instead, we get paralysis.

I think he doesn't board because by that point, he's realized something unbearable: he can't actually solve anything by going back. The visit would be temporary. He'd see his dying mother, embrace his wife, and then what? Return to Bombay empty-handed again? Stay in the village and watch them all slowly starve together?

The city has broken something in him. Not his love - that's intact, that's what torments him - but his ability to believe in simple solutions. Going home has become not a homecoming but another form of failure. He can't provide, can't protect, can't even promise when he'll return next. The train becomes a symbol of all the false promises he's already made to himself and to his family.

There's also something about shame in that moment. He left with hope, with dreams of sending money back, of building something. To return defeated, to face his mother's failing eyes and his wife's patient waiting with nothing to show - perhaps that feels more cruel than staying away. At least absence can be dressed up as struggle, as "still trying." Presence would expose the full truth of his defeat.

The film doesn't let him - or us - off the hook with either a triumphant return or a clean break. He's trapped in the in-between, the Trishanku state, which is where so many migrants actually live. Not quite here, not quite there. It's the honesty of that non-ending, that paralysis, that helplessness, that makes it so painful. The ending isn't about a "decision" so much as it is about impossibility - the impossibility of choosing when every choice is a loss.

Can Philosophy Help?

Sitting on that plane, my own parents' faces fresh in my mind, Ghulam's paralysis feeling uncomfortably familiar, I found myself asking: how does one make choices when every choice is a loss? Can I take refuge in philosophy, or am I just being an escapist?

I've thought about this a lot, and here's what I've come to: philosophy can offer something, but we should be clear about what it can and cannot do. It won't dissolve the loss or make the pain disappear. What it might offer is a framework for living with irresolvable tension - which is different from solving it.

The Stoics would say: distinguish between what's in your control and what isn't. I can't make my parents younger, can't collapse the distance between Frankfurt and India, can't undo the structural realities that created this situation. But I can control my choices within these constraints, and more importantly, my relationship to those choices. The goal isn't to feel no pain—that would be inhuman - but to not add unnecessary suffering through constant self-recrimination or the fantasy that a "right answer" exists somewhere if I just think hard enough.

Existentialists like Sartre might frame it differently: we're "condemned to be free." Even in lose-lose situations, I'm making a choice - staying is a choice, returning is a choice, some hybrid arrangement is a choice. The anguish comes from recognizing that I alone must author this decision without external justification. But there's also a kind of integrity in that: I'm not pretending there's a cosmic answer key that tells me what to do. I'm acknowledging the weight of it and choosing anyway.

Buddhist philosophy offers another angle: the recognition that dukkha - suffering, unsatisfactoriness - is inherent in existence, particularly in attachment and impermanence. My parents are aging. That's the nature of life. We will too. I have built a life elsewhere. That's also the nature of change. The suffering isn't anomalous; it's the human condition. This doesn't remove the pain, but it can remove the additional layer of "this shouldn't be happening" or "I've failed because this hurts." It hurts because I love them. That's not a problem to be solved; it's the price of love.

Indian philosophy, particularly in the Bhagavad Gita, deals with dharma - righteous duty in impossible circumstances. Arjuna faces his own lose-lose: fight and kill his relatives, or abandon his duty and let injustice prevail. Krishna doesn't tell him there's a painless option. Instead: act according to your dharma, knowing that the fruits of action aren't fully in your control. My duty involves multiple competing dharmas - as a son, as a husband, as a father, as a professional, as someone building a life. Philosophy won't tell me which weighs more, but it might help me act with intention rather than paralysis.

Not Refuge, But Clarity

But here's what troubles me about taking "refuge" in philosophy: refuge suggests escape, and I'm not sure that's what I need. The pain of being torn between two loves, two duties, two lives - that pain is appropriate. It's the emotional acknowledgment of something real and profound. Philosophy at its best doesn't numb you to this; it helps you carry it with more clarity.

The poet Rumi, coming from Sufi philosophy, writes about the guest house - how grief and sorrow are visitors to be welcomed, not expelled. My pain about my parents isn't something to philosophize away. It's information. It's telling me what matters. Philosophy's role might be to help me hear it more clearly and act on it more deliberately.

So yes, philosophy can help - not as refuge in the sense of a hiding place, but as a set of tools for thinking clearly about what I value, what I can control, and how to make choices when all options involve real loss. The framework won't make it hurt less, but it might make the pain more bearable by giving it meaning.

Sometimes the most helpful thing isn't an answer but simply having the situation seen clearly - the weight of it, the impossibility of it, the fact that feeling torn isn't a failure but the only sane response to genuinely competing loves.

Living in the In-Between

Gaman stays with you precisely because it refuses consolation. Ghulam standing at that station, unable to board, unable to leave - that's an honest ending. My parallel to it - the longing in my parents' eyes, their perfected care during brief visits, my sense of excruciating choice - that's equally honest.

Philosophy might help me reframe the question. Instead of "what's the right choice?" - which assumes there is one - perhaps I should ask: What can I live with? What honors both the life 

I've built and the people who made it possible? What allows me to look at myself honestly?

These aren't easier questions, but they're answerable in a way "what's right?" might never be.

And maybe there's something else: we speak of this as binary - stay or return - but human arrangements are often more fluid than that. Building a career that allows for longer periods away, bringing parents over for extended visits, creating structures where I'm more available even at a distance. These aren't perfect solutions, but lose-lose situations sometimes have "lose less" options that only become visible when you stop searching for the one right answer.

I'm still on that platform with Ghulam, in a way. Still caught between worlds, still feeling the pull from both sides. The difference is I'm learning to live with it - not happily, not without pain, but with more clarity about what I'm carrying and why.

The train comes and goes. Some days I board it; some days I don't. But I'm still there on the platform, still connected to both worlds, still feeling the weight of it all. And maybe, just maybe, that's not paralysis. Maybe it's the only honest way to live when you love people on opposite sides of an impossible distance.

Gaman means "to go" or "journey" in Hindi. But the film's deepest truth is about what happens when the journey never really ends, when you're always leaving and always arriving, always here and always there, always carrying both the life you've built and the lives you've left behind.

That's the web we live in. And perhaps the task isn't to escape it, but to carry it with as much grace and honesty as we can manage.