We spend much of our lives becoming someone in the eyes of others. At work, we acquire designations, build careers, and earn reputations. At home, we are parents, children, partners, and providers. Each role comes with its own expectations, and we learn to inhabit them, sometimes comfortably, sometimes reluctantly.

Each role is a colour on the palette. We mix them, layer them, and learn which ones the world responds to. But a palette is not a painting.

Scrape away these professional and personal layers, and a question remains: Who am I, when I am not required to be anyone in particular?

It is a question of identity, not image. The two are easily confused. An image is what we want others to see; an identity is what we recognise ourselves to be. Creating an identity for oneself may matter as much as creating an image for others, perhaps more. Yet we spend considerably more time on the latter.

Nana Patekar died on 8 October 2026, aged seventy-five. The obituaries recall what the public knew: the intensity, the voice, the dialogues audiences could recite back, from five decades of Hindi and Marathi cinema. His life, like that of many public figures, also had its share of controversy.

But the crowd that waited for hours outside his farmhouse, in a village on the edge of Pune, remembered something else. In 2015, as recurring drought and agrarian distress pushed Maharashtra’s farmers deeper into debt, he and fellow actor Makarand Anaspure set up the Naam Foundation. Naam means name. A man whose name had been made on screen lent it to people who seldom appear in headlines, except when something goes terribly wrong.

Whether this was a search for identity, a desire for peace, or simply who he had always been, I cannot say. I did not know him well enough to presume. What I can see is that the profession gave him the means, and he chose where to spend them. And perhaps that is the point. A profession can provide the means to live, without necessarily defining what makes life worth living.

The gold that lights a stage and the gold that ripens a field can come from the same tube. The difference lies in where the hand chooses to place it.

I see echoes of this among people I know, particularly those who have spent years in the IT industry. I recognise something of it in myself, too. Some are drawn towards farming, quieter towns, ancestral homes, or pursuits that have little to do with their expertise. The reasons differ: the uncertainty of the industry, its round-the-clock demands, or simply the exhaustion of always having to perform a role.

Or perhaps they have reached a point where the question is no longer, what more can I achieve? but what do I actually enjoy doing?

There is a difference between escaping a life and choosing one. Returning to one’s roots need not mean rejecting professional success, nor does it imply disillusionment with modern work. It may simply be an attempt to recover parts of oneself left unattended while building a career.

Farming, gardening, teaching, writing, or time spent in a familiar village may seem unremarkable beside professional achievements. Yet they can offer what a designation cannot: a sense of belonging, purpose, and ownership over one’s time.

Perhaps we do not need to discover an entirely new identity. Perhaps we need only to recognise the one that has been quietly waiting beneath the roles we have learnt to play. Painters have a word for this: pentimento, the earlier drawing that surfaces as the layers above it thin with age. The first lines were never erased, only painted over.

The difficulty is that this recognition often comes late, after years spent meeting expectations, our own as much as those of others. We may know what we do, what we earn, and how the world sees us, without knowing what we would choose if none of it mattered.

So, beyond the headlines, the designations, and the carefully constructed images, who am I?

I suspect the answer lies less in what we say about ourselves than in what we choose to do when nobody expects anything of us. And perhaps the more revealing question is not what identity we have created, but whether the life we are living allows us to recognise ourselves in it.

A related reflection

Nothing is made, nothing disappears is about the moment a role is taken away and the question of who we are arrives uninvited.