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Home - By- Shaili Chopra Shaili is currently a senior graduate student in Economics Honours at Delhi University, India. She is the features editor of a print magazine called "Campus dot com" for the university itself. She is a fond cook and a intrepid traveller. She is fond of writing and poetry. Her poetry and writings are published in many magazines, Newspapers and on websites.

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing."- Harriet Stowe

It is true you can't appreciate home till you've left it. I have lived away from home for almost seven years now and am still undeveloped to have a home of mine own yet. These years of "my own space" have urged me to delve into the conscious of the person who must have coined the word 'home'. The immense faculty of thoughts he left for others to mold the word to their discernment is commendable. In its four-letter prudence, it has been cast into any derivation that meant easy competence, familiarity, security, happiness or refuge.

Home sweet home is an abused phrase one nowadays only comes across in government hospital waiting rooms on mounted fading scenic prints, cheap plastic home decoration and coir doormats. It is a reminder of the treatment it goes through due to our own variable moods, life stages and transformations that are perhaps not philosophically deserving to its authority. But at the same time these are constant refreshers for us to realize and revive our bored belongingness to its absolutely nurturing faculty as an almost life form; the need to lift it from its given granted stature. In their most elementary notion, hospital, cheap home décor, doormat refer to as cheesy examples, but they also crave to depict the place where something is secured, restored; beautified, promoted; founded, cleansed.

The word home is Middle English, derived from the Old English ham, a son of Noah and the brother of Japheth and Shem in the Old Testament. On postulation, the Noah's ark was a personification of what home is to its members, a saving grace. A comfortable home is a great source of happiness. It ranks almost immediately after health and a good conscience. It seems to encompass pastures of hybrid growth and an unknown emancipation that culminates in a firm-binding root. At this moment I think no more appropriate than what Robert Frost said, "Home is one place when you go there they have to take you in."

At the moment of birth, the separation from mother's womb, we lose the most secure and natural feeling home. From then it there is cyclical change- especially in modern times. There is a long search punctuated by periods of escapism. We change spaces, circulate, change sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and change opinions sometimes not as our conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls. But all human beings finally come home either by physical death or wretchedness or by becoming enlightened or fulfilled while alive. Between birth and death/enlightenment, there is a conjecture that there is somewhere to go-be it the home on streets or under a thatch roof or four walls. It is a conclusion to your ferret. "If I were asked to name the chief benefit of a home, I should say: the home shelters daydreaming, the home protects the dreamer, the home allows one to dream in peace." said Gaston Bachelard, the French literary theorist.

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . anywhere in the world. The four freedoms come to conjoin like the four letters to culminate in 'home'.

There is an "om" in "home". In Sanskrit, Om is the sacred seed syllable from which all creation is known to have come. It is the primal sound. A calling into the unknown pit of the universe, that prepares a cosmic link. God is the true self of the Universe. It is said that God is everywhere. Om is sometimes translated by the word God. The feeling of finding God is much like the feeling of being home at last.

But, again, where is home? Being truly home is being centered in one's real self. Perhaps, that is why there is an OM in home! Home is our very own deepest center. If we do not enter this center when we are so called "at home", we then go out seeking home because we are restless, i.e., without rest. Home is where we rest. So many modern people today feel alone and uncentered in their apartments and houses simply because they have failed to attain self- realization. The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no more than one place where to lay his head except 'home'. As Charles Dickens has puts it, "Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration."

Until we connect again....

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