About "Is there still no place like home?"

The following is a revised essay from 2019, January. Why did I write it? that is a separate matter. I shall mention that some other day. But for now, there is a question and an essay for the same. 

Is there still no place like home?

The eponymous character E.T. – that oddly shaped and completely loveable character – from Steven Spielberg’s film said – as far as I remember – two comprehensible words. One was “Elly-Ott.” The second was “Home”. Every time E.T. said “Home” in that rumbly voice – his index finger would glow red. He missed home so badly that he fell in a state of malaise, which did not seem purely physical to my long-gone 10 year old self. He perked up as soon as he saw – well, what did he see? His home was surely not his spaceship that had descended to Earth. Yet he waddles up happily and gleefully – all bodily, emotional and spiritual malaise forgotten. His mum and dad were there. In a sense, he was home. Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza make a houseboat their home in the concluding pages of Marquez’s classic. Then there is The Little Prince from St. Antoine Exupery’s timeless tale, who after his earthly adventures takes the help of the snake to go back home, back to his planet, and to especially his fragile and hoity-toity rose that loved him and whom he adored. He dies. He returns home. And why stop with the world of "higher" sentient life form – whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial when approaching the idea of home? I am reminded of the tall and lanky Palm Tree – whom I encountered when I was 8 years of age – from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem – who daydreams fondly of sailing off to far-off places like the skimming black clouds that traverse the skies, and yet as dusk drops and the tree pauses in his dreaming spree – he realises that the Earth is his mother – he feels an ineffable contentment in his earthly corner, his home. To move from the mundane to the magical and into the mystical (might some find it morbid?) – the sea is not the home of the sailor and the hill is not the home of the hunter for Robert Louis Stevenson in his “Requiem”. Death is home or else it is the grand and ultimate way back home. Then there was Jim Reeves who sang “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through...” Emily Dickinson must have felt something similar and yet deeply connected to that "Species" that "stands beyond; Invisible as music but positive as sound..." and felt connected to a surreal sense of "home" and "oneness", when she penned the lines, “This world is not conclusion...” And Bod’s home? In Neil Gaiman’s magical The Graveyard Book, Bod's home had been for many years, yes – a graveyard with ghosts and a magical being. And yes, who can forget Dumbledore's line, regarding "the next great adventure"?. And in the grand Bengali novel, Debjaan (The Way of the Gods) by Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay – home might be here – somewhere in this world, on this “pale blue dot” to quote Carl Sagan – or else it could be macrocosms away, temporally and spatially unreachable and inaccessible until and unless we lift and pass through the veil and embark on fantastical journeys. 

Human beings lose their homes, leave homes, make homes, move homes, find homes, feel at home, return home, discover a home, break homes, create homes, wonder of an ideal home, yearn for home, search for home, set up a home. Home – even in this rather mundane, chaotic, brutal, beautiful, beastly, serene, technologically-advanced, digitally overwhelming, conflict-ridden, and oft-times-incomprehensible world where travel, and even global travel, has become a fairly easy affair for the well-off from many in the developed and developing nations or for those who are not viewed suspiciously at Visa offices – holds a place of significance, which cannot be dislodged or displaced.

Can there even be a uniform answer to the question – is there still no place like home? – The questions and the corresponding responses set off ways of looking at and of coming to an understanding of how wide and deep and divergent the imagined, mental construct of “home” and the actual home can be as compared to that which is not perceived as home. 

While engaging with the question – I have found myself saying a quiet “no” over and over again. For one thing, if any place were “like” home – it would be home. And no matter how I approach the question – and true, there are very many thousands of conceptions, understandings and interpretations of what home means and implies, which change politically, socially, culturally, contextually and at the macro, meso and micro levels while similarities are carried from age to age and place to place and across people – it would seem to me that for human beings, home remains  a place that is unique, incomparable (or only set up as reference point to make favourable or unfavourable comparisons) and desired or is a place – if even imagined – one, which is intrinsically, inherently and even perhaps, ineffably, desirable.

The matter can be approached from different schools and disciplines of thought that encompass economics, sociology, political science, geography, psychology and religion and across levels and ways of seeing, whether individualist or collectivist, universal or cultural, and there could be many combinations and permutations born of varied understandings and alternative perspectives. To borrow from Stephen Covey, the lenses one uses to examine the idea and the meaning of home, and its place within the world and beyond, shapes one’s responses, shroud and even reveal one’s personal biases and prejudices, and also takes us a little closer – one hopes – to the journey’s end of why there is still no place like home. One would like to present as inclusive, diverse and holistic a view as possible, and yet given one’s experience, training, background and understanding one also knows that it never is quite possible to include all views without generalising and no matter if one believes or imagines one is expounding upon the views and often overlooked perspectives of marginalized groups – one has realised that even among marginalized groups or those that are almost invisible, perspectives and viewpoints vary widely and even wildly, which social scientists often have to gloss over for too much attention to the aberrant outliers within outlying groups gives rise to confusion and complexity and the picture becomes a picture constantly in motion. Being aware of such limitations is an advantage – not a disadvantage. One does not become incapacitated by such limitations but acknowledges that despite such limitations, there is much that can be approached and sensibly answered without becoming convinced that one is some soothsayer or all-knowing being who has got the ultimate handle on the question: is there still no place like home?

As one cogitates upon the question, and one’s mind glances over illustrations from various branches of thought, formal disciplines and one’s own understanding gathered through a lifetime of quiet wondering, a bit of study, a lot of madness, travel, observation, experience, conversation and reflection – one cannot let the idea of home remain swathed in the comforting whirl of emotions or conflicting sentiment that the word carries or allow it to remain somewhat inscrutable by dint of the fact that home is not merely tied to the physical construct of four walls or a geographical tract of land or an official “permanent” address. The four walls could be replaced by a half sphere or a cone-line structure or a tent – but one understands. The lack of a permanent address while a pain (as anyone trying to fill out a form at government offices will know) cannot quite be equated to the absence of a home. That is why historically, and subject to economic and socio-political requirements, the corresponding definitions and descriptions of the house and home have sometimes been viewed as separate entities or have been merged.

Home is -  and is more than – the physical space contained within the confines of four walls, more than a physical rootedness that a human being or groups of human beings experience in relation to a geographical tract of land or possibly – depending upon the manner in which one frames, defines and understands the idea of what “home” implies – the very idea of home includes the tangible, the intangible, the physical, the emotional, the economic, the geo-political, the socio-cultural, the individual, the universal, the pragmatic, the idealistic, the spiritual and the imaginative. 

Depending upon which viewpoint one wishes to adopt, home relates to the matter of identity and Self, it intertwines intimately with the idea of finding oneself, of connecting to something deeper, something psychical just as much, at least – if not more – as it relates to the political and physical. Home connects and resonates for many as a place of belonging, as a place of contentment, human fulfillment – even bliss. It is felt to be a space where one can be one’s self; a place where one experiences the deepest and most meaningful of human bonding and relationships. Yet what of the political prisoner under house arrest? – I find myself asking.  And what of the politically exiled and ex-communicated ex-hero who is now perceived to be a traitor by those in positions of political power or authority? And somewhat contrarily, what happens when home itself becomes a place of unrest or abuse or misery or just plain and simple boredom? Does a person – whether a man, woman or child then desire a place other than home? Or does one discard the concept of home as being a piece born from one’s own or someone else’s fevered and delirious imagination? Or does a person still feel that there is a home for him or her, if only such a place could be found or discovered?

As long as the concept of nation-states exists and as long as political boundaries separate my land from yours – the idea of home, at one level, cannot be approached without taking into consideration the geo-political, the socio-psychological and the economic. For what about the refugee who must flee the night, with his family or alone, while bullets whizz over a land gone mad? And what about the tribal who must keep moving further and further back on the land that her ancestors occupied for generations until there is nowhere to go but fall into the sea or disappear up a tree, perhaps, because the non-tribals want the land to drill for oil or mine for metals or open a golf course or perhaps, with more noble intentions, construct a dam? What about races who yearn for their “homeland” or people who must cross borders overnight because there are two nations created out of one? And how was that nation drawn up anyway? But drawn it was, and this created a political idea, which gave rise to the "Imagined Community" of Benedict Anderson, which then became real in its consequences ("Thomas Theorem"), as in being "home" to over 300 million when the nation was divided on the basis of a social identity marker. 

And what of the people who have all but their lives wiped out by some natural calamity or disaster? Did they lose their homes? Yes. But they lost something else or something more than a physical space with their possessions or are those very ideas contained within the construct of “home”? And what about the traditional nomads, the Dom and the Romani who wandered from the deserts of Rajasthan in India, The Punjab, Haryana and further north all the way to Eastern Europe and beyond, and down South to Greece? Where was and where is home for them? Do their descendants feel at home in whichever nations they reside or do they feel an inexplicable, irrational wanderlust coursing their blood? What of the wandering minstrels in Eastern India, who used to travel from village to village and occasionally through city spots in India? Did they travel and wander about, settling nowhere in particular for long stretches merely for matters economic? Or is it that they have made the world, which they can traverse on foot, their home? Or is it that they feel no overwhelming urge to connect to any single place as home? One can muse about the still-ubiquitous but perhaps less rarely visible matted hair, saffron clad wandering mendicants of varied dispositions, and I am sure, at differing levels of self-actualization with their traditional food bowls, cloth sacks and sometimes even travelling monkeys for company. Where really is home for such people, and do they care overmuch about the idea of home?

To take another detour – what about the nameless, faceless bands of the homeless across lands, ages and political boundaries? Do they dream of having a space to call home? Do they see any space as being home? What of the aged who find themselves in Old-age “homes” and orphans who find themselves in shelters variously dubbed “Homes” and “foster homes”? What about those whom we label the insane and who sometimes (conveniently forgotten by their families) spend the best part of a lifetime in facilities, which are sometimes followed or preceded by the rather sanitized and apparently warm nomenclature of “home”? Do they – some, many, a few – feel that they are in a place that resembles home or did some go mad in the first place trying to find home?

Each individual would have a different tale to tell. Numbers and statistics would provide us with gigantic patterns where individual stories – like it or not – would not matter (paraphrased from Zygmunt Baumann). Yet can meaning ever be seen without the stories and first identifying the stories?

My mind returns to the pictures and images that fluttered about at the beginning of this essay. None of those views have become obsolete. That’s what I see. And it is precisely because the idea of home is so incredibly expansive and diverse, and contains so much more than just the physical or just the psychical or just this or just that that even today home remains unparalleled in comparison to any other space or place in what it signifies. And maybe, for some, which would be for many millions - if not billions - on this very planet, home is about discovering for oneself what Jesus meant when he stated, “The kingdom of heaven is within you”, and from there going on a journey where the destination becomes less and less important, and one where home eventually signifies no specific physical place or space.