Home

An estimated one hundred million people in the world are categorized homeless in a 2005 survey completed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (homelessworldcup.org, 2014). When it comes to the term, most believe the figures presented, but the word “home” is is very complex and can vary from person to 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 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 serpent. Connecting home to a fixed geographical or mental sphere will limit its meaning unless concept of evolution of home based on perception and experience one encounters is also considered.

One may agree that home keeps evolving but argue that people keep on relating to the place where they spent most of their time, so how home changes for the same person.

. The Answer to this lies in the general human behaviour, for a child his toys are 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 the whole conception changes completely,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 till 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 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 people on this concept is mixed, on one hand they agree that home is in mind and differs according to the perception but on the other hand they argue that a person remains attached to the home since childhood so how can emotions 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 evolves.Like while reading a detective novel we are not presented with all the clues in the initial chapters but then also we try 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. 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 article 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. 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. Parents may attribute their daughter as their home but at the same time the daughter may finds her home around her husband.

Home is in one’s mind, certainly, but I disagree that it always remains the same even if it is attributed to a geographical location. Physically home may have remained same for a person throughout one’s life or is a place one feels nostalgic about but 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, S. S. (2000). Deeds design destiny (2^nd edition). India