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Home... is where the heart is

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V-Day is me-day

V-Day is me-day

What is that special place that one could truly call ‘home’ in today’s world with its diminishing geographical boundaries

BY SAROJA SRINIVASAN

In dictionaries, definitions of home are various. It is both ‘a place of origin’, ‘a starting position’ and ‘a goal or destination’. It may also be ‘an environment offering security and happiness’ or ‘the place where something is discovered, founded, developed or promoted’. A source.”

Geraldine Brooks, Boyer Lecture 2011.

This idea of where one’s home is has intrigued me for a long time. Every year around Australia Day which is also India’s Republic Day, this issue surfaces even more. Recently Geraldine Brooks’ series of Boyer Lectures The idea of home rekindled this question. This is a question pondered upon often by expatriates. Where is home for those who have left their country of origin? Is it where they were born? Is it where they lived during their younger years? Is it where they lived as adolescents when their sense of individuality/identity was formed? Is it where their first house was bought with their husband/wife/partner? Is it where their children were born and raised?

generations did, the idea of where ‘home’ becomes fluid. For the global citizen, home has no geographical boundaries. They adapt and appear not to feel the need to ‘belong’ to any one place. All external details seem to become background shadows in the landscape of one’s life.

In an era where people change jobs and residences more often than previous generations did, the idea of where ‘home’ is fluid.

What makes it much harder for people living away from their country of origin from where a number of cultural and family values were learned/experienced, is the lack of those same values in newer contexts. The many subtle influences that gave them a sense of who they were and how they belonged in that context becomes hard to be validated, and a sense of isolation permeates their psyche. Negative experiences in establishing comfortable living conditions often results in the person oscillating between fear and hope. Doubts arise about decisions made, confidence hits a low never experienced before. At such times it is hard to imagine where they have chosen to live as being a safe and secure ‘home’. Should I return ‘home’, they wonder.

All of these houses/places would have been home at various times, by and large with pleasant memories of them. Wherever we choose to live or happen to be born or live for long periods, gives us the security and happiness the definition talks about. Yet for some people such places also conjure up unhappy memories, and perhaps even some that have been hostile and threatening. Such people often refrain from calling anywhere ‘home’. Where you live or lived may not necessarily define one’s ‘home’, I guess.

Yet at various times most people oscillate between which one of them they call ‘home’. For years when an expatriate first lives overseas, getting ready for their annual or biannual trip back they would say, “I am going home”. Once they have lived away from ‘home’ for many years, they also begin to say ‘I am going home to ........’ . In colloquial parlance it seems home is where you live at any given time. In an era where people change jobs and residences more often than previous

As a traveler one may find oneself in a place where they have never been, yet it invokes a certain familiarity, a certain sense of ‘homeliness’ that makes one wonder where this feeling comes from.

This amorphous construct ‘home’ is influenced by so many factors that it is hard to pin it down to one or two features that define where home may be. As a traveler one may find oneself in a place where they have never been, yet it invokes a certain familiarity, a certain sense of ‘homeliness’ that makes one wonder where this feeling comes from. Perhaps it is more important to feel ‘at home’ within oneself and then the outward tangible presentations will fade into insignificance. This would free one to call everywhere ‘home’ as long as it is safe and free. Each of us sees, feels and experiences the world around us in our own unique way and it beholds us to “to inhabit a space... not particular and national, but infinite and universal, a world in which every object sang… with its own particular music, chiming out in delicate arpeggios and thundering chords!” as exquisitely described by Geraldine Brookes.

One can begin to live and enjoy life with a certain feeling of lightness – a freedom, a certain nonattachment that allows one to live life to the full wherever we are. Perhaps this is what is meant by the concept of self as sakshi in Vedanta, living as a ‘witness’ of one’s life to enjoy it fully

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