Blog #5: What is home?

Three of the Ashoka students' blogs held some revelations for me, and I'll try to sum them up here.

First, Ishanika sees home as a base where someone can find his or her identity through introspection of the past, the present, and the future. I've seen home presented as a fixed space, usually metaphorically, for someone to link memory, emotion, and identity. However, it didn't occur to me that it's also a place to look at the future, almost like a new starting point for the old (new?) personality to begin. Gradually, I understood that every future becomes a "present" and "past," like steps in some direction. But wherever the steps may go, there will always be that first step, which is home.

Nainika brought up the TED talk by Zak Ebrahim, whose father was an extremist and part of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Home seems like one permanent thing, but home can always change. She infers that that something, or someone (in this case, parents) define "home" for children and it tends to stay that way until something happens to drastically re-define this space. I think this is germane - in a general sense, we see home as an unchanging place until something forces us to rethink the idea. It could be gradual, such as coming of age and leaving the nest, or in a split second after coming up against something completely opposite of what is "known."(These could be considered "aha" or "uh-oh" moments.)

I enjoyed Priyavrat's philosophical journey into the different elements which blend to develope one's sense of home. I queried which was the strongest pull for him - I personally believe we all have the one thing, such as memory, or emotion, and the others (physicality, location, art) complement the strongest tie in some way. For instance, a vinyl-covered couch (physicality) may remind someone of grandma's living room. I like how he wanted to investigate all these inputs and discover their interactions.