Home Sweet Home

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Home is what you go away from as from a mother. The mother is home, the mother is the womb, a self sufficient prison where you are fed with love, care, attention and concern. The babe seeks freedom to see the world outside, to eke out  his own living to know to suffer, enjoy and fulfil the obligations of mortality. I know most of my readers will not agree. Mother is love, mother is the source of life and her upbringing prepares a man to face the challenges of life: They would say tirelessly. The home is heaven, the abode of peace and certitude! For a moment let me concede, let me say yes to the sentiment for I was taught in my childhood to worship mother and consider home to be the best place  in the world. Poets have sung panegyrics  for the home and mother. It's mother who brings you  to the world. Very true. Why then people who matter leave their homes?

Buddha left home and mother , the lure of the pleasure palace of beauty, youth and sex. Adi Shankar left his mother who was a helpless widow. Christ lived beyond his mother and Home -  even Gandhi. The Indian sages  thought of the larger world as their home. The ( Rig ) Vedic Civilization taught to consider the world as your home- Vasudhyeba Kutumbakam. The world is your family. Dosteovsky wished man to make the world his home. Bertrand Russell and others wanted the world to come under one unitary administration. In the seventies of the last century the idea  of Globalization began to catch the imagination of the countries, especially the richer ones But all those lofty ideas failed us. Our mythical gods too are homeless in heaven. All sages, poets, thinkers and politicians  never think of a cosy home somewhere elusively away from all lures of the real world. W. B. Yeats wanted to go to Innisfree and live there in the 'bee loud glade'? Our own Rdhanath wished to spend his westward life on the shores of the goose swimming blue waters of Chilika. Did he?

Home is a conceptual paradigm of an insufficient mind, of a person whose self belief is suspect, one who depends on others to fulfil the needs of his body, mind and soul if there is any. Home is not a four walled house with a roof to save one from the vagaries of nature. Home is where you do not feel like a prisoner, guarded, fed and guided, protected as in the mother's womb. Home is or should be a metaphor of a celestial world of bliss where the mind is free like nature, vast as multitudinous skies where clouds never come to wipe it off our sights, and where the petty needs of the body do not compel you to worrisome work for a few banknotes.

I am my home. My Being is home enough for everything that we see , hear  and read. My home is larger than the world of eye and ear. The sea, sky and earth with the rivers, mountains  and glades; the billions of creatures, including the wise and wily bipeds are my nerves and sinews like the  wired universe. But let me pause and ask myself why do you need a home then? Why do Governments all over the world have housing schemes? Why does Modi promise hundreds of millions of homes for the homeless Indians? Well these are houses for people to eat, sleep and die not homes where you contain universes. You do not feel responsible for another man, You have no qualms of conscience when houses burn in your neighbourhood by mindless mobs who gloat over the bellowing smoke; You have demands, needs wants of the body which others must fulfil. You are a lonely creature languishing under your incompetence; you protest, beg for mercy and even kill and shamelessly speak out, "we will snatch away what we need from the "other" before whom we crouch in fear. Such persons lack what the ancients called Purushokara, manliness, the pride of being.  In short, these creatures never feel at home anywhere in time and space.

Home is a hypocritical template for the unworthy for he does not find certitude anywhere. He has no quest for Oneness. He is a dismembered specimen who thinks of segregating his walled world from the larger multicoloured splendour of reality. Me, mine and a Cartesian I comprise his nonbeing. His mind never can conceive of a Pegasus flight to conquer the sunless reality beyond the solar system. He sits surrounded by his, what he calls,  loved ones and thinks of the routine of food, education, house, marriage, success and other associated things hiding his inner discord from his neighbours. He calls his house Home Sweet Home and gets nervous if he misses his own address. He thinks constantly of buying a bigger house, a larger lawn, a gothic gabion, Italian marbles and loses his sleep.  He is confined to a 1000 sq foot flat or a mansion, palace for he is never satisfied with what he has.  He feels cabined and boxed and dreams of the whole of space. Yet he calls it sweet home in a self consolatory surrender of his ego. He is never the Home of life, never the fulfilled soul above desire. Hence his mind always wanders outside his home counting his inadequacies.