Kaleidoscopic Home: It never remains the same

One hundred million is the estimated count of the people termed as homeless after a survey done in 2005 by United Nations Commission on Human Rights (homelessworldcup.org, 2014). When it comes to the term of being ‘homeless’, most of us believe the figure presented in the above survey however the agreement ends as soon as word home is emphasized because it is so complex and carry so many different meanings for every person. To present an all-encompassing definition of home is very difficult due to its evolving nature as one progresses through the trajectory of life. The difference in perception is explained in a very beautiful way by renowned saint Kabir Sahib Ji  In his words:

                       हंसा बगुला एक रंग, मान सरोवर माहिं ।

                      बगुला ढूंढै माछरी, हंसा मोती खांहि ।।­

Saint Kabir sahib ji asserts that the swan and heron bear same colour, both dwelling in the lake divine, Heron searches for fish while swan like to be fed upon pearls (Namah, 2000). The other example could be of a drop which transforms accordingly when it falls on banana leaf, oyster and in the mouth of a serpent.

Connecting home to a fixed geographical or mental sphere will limit its meaning unless the concept of evolution of home based on perception and experience one encounters is also considered.

The idea of home as an evolving entity raises the question of how home can change for the same person. One may move to a different place but then also keeps relating to the previous place. The answer to it lies in the general human behaviour which manifests itself in ways that slowly evolve. For a child, his toys would mean everything to him and when it gets broken, he starts weeping but when the kid enters teenage, his fascination shifts from toys to his friends and although he feels nostalgic at times remembering his toys and time spent playing with them, he no longer would like to spend his time playing with them significantly. This reflects change in mental sphere which will keep changing as the time progresses. For some, home may remain same geographically for their entire life but their perspective towards it changes from time to time which makes them look at things differently. Sometimes they feel attached to one thing more than the other and sometimes just opposite happens but it never remains the same throughout their life. Pico Iyer in his Ted Talk (2013) speaks about what he thought the home was for a major part of his life and how it got changed. He reveals that until the time his house was burnt, he related his idea of home to the materialistic things but later during his visit to a monastery his perspective changed completely like the two opposite poles of the magnet. Previously for him home was all that he had but now it was no longer materialistic but only peace. One can easily reaffirm that Iyer’s home evolved for him due to his change of vision. This behaviour can be understood simply with example of coloured spectacles, as one switches spectacles from blue to red the whole world looks red which previously seemed to be blue.

Feeling of many people on this concept is mixed as on one hand they agree that home is in mind not on map and differs according to the perception but on the other hand argue that a person remains attached to the home since childhood so how can emotions and attachment towards home gets changed and the same person starts associating his home to totally different things? I do not advocate that emotions or feelings gets changed but emphasize that they evolve, like while reading a detective novel we are not presented with all the clues in the initial chapters but then also we keep on trying to find the culprit by associating small details with the characters, as we move to advance chapters our database of clues expands and we switch the character that we initially thought was main culprit by some other character. Similarly as we move forward in life our list of experiences expands which adds to our understanding, changing the way we access the things, to a more broad view. This is brought up in essay Romancing the rains (Kashyap, 2014) in which the writer starts by fantasizing home as a place of enjoyment and narrates his happy moments with his family but later when he acknowledges the horrible moments that other have experienced at home then he realizes that his theory of home was biased on his personal encounters only and after updating his perspective he wonders if he still could fantasize home as a place of only happy moments.

One can complicate the matter further by arguing that home cannot be made by just single person, it is collective effort of all the people living in it so how can it be changed with the change in ideology of just one person? Potential answer for this to which most critical thinkers would agree is that one is defining home according to one’s own view and is not going by the view of other people. Although they are in same family but this does not imply that their mindset needs to be same. For the parents home may mean their daughter but, at the same time the daughter may finds her home around her husband.

Summarizing all the arguments I celebrate the fact that home is in one’s mind but I disagree that it always remains the same even if it is attributed to a geographical location which has remained same for a person throughout one’s life or is a place one feels nostalgic about because life is an ongoing process and it is impossible to avoid encountering new experiences and knowledge, which in turn changes the perspective and priorities as a result of which conception of home changes at every turn like pattern in same kaleidoscope changes at every angle. Home maybe found around materialistic things or maybe accepted as a state of mind because man is his own architect and can construct whatever he is capable of but the concept he projects keeps evolving like an old building which needs to be repaired from time to time.

References

Homelessworldcup.org. Retrieved September 25, 2014 from http://www.homelessworldcup.org/content/homelessness-statistics

Kashyap, A. (2014, July 11). Romancing the rains. BLINK: The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved September 1, 2014 from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/blink/cover/romancing-the-rains/article6197554.ece

Iyer, P. (2013, July 17). What is home? TedTalk [video file]. Edinburg, Scotland: TedTalk. Retrieved September 17, 2014 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m6dV7Xo3Vc

Namah, Shri Sadguru (2000), Deeds Design Destiny (second edition), India