Someone called it one of the priceless boons of our civilization, I mean the realization, that we do not know where we are, provided we know where we are going to. Going home is more of a bonanza in the wake of this observation, for the fact is that we don't take a trip home. More often it is a trip home that takes us along. May be we go places and stay on there because we know we can get out of there and go home or as someone would prefer to say 'come home', when we decide to. Aren't we inclined to believe that our lips had murmured the refrain 'home, sweet home' much before John H. Payne ever decided to put it in black and white? There are perhaps not many rememberances that arouse nostalgic feelings in us to a greater depth than the one of going home so often does.
The reason is not hard to see: Going home and nostalgia have shared a common past for almost three centuries now. It was sometime late in the seventeenth century that a Swiss physician, Johanannes Hofer by name, found Swiss mercenaries fighting far from their native land in the ranks of one or the other European despot, afflicted with lability of emotion and a generalized languishing away. Though the more straightforward homesickness from the German heimweh was ready at hand, he found it somewhat wanting and coined a new word from the Greek nostos, to return home, and algai, a painful condition. Thus nostalgia had originally meant 'a painful yearning to return home'. Wasn't Keats' Ruth being nostalgic in the original sense of the word when 'She stood in tears amid the alien corn' in his Ode To A Nightingale?
Quite a significant word in the phrase 'a painful yearning to return home' is the word 'painful' which imparts a special meaning to the act of returning home. Some of us may be willing to testify that at one or the other time in life they had felt a subtle twang at the strings of their heart, besides a generalized feeling of buoyancy, at the sudden mention of the idea of going home. Some may prefer to describe it as a 'delicious pain' while others may call it an unnameable pang that tinges their joy of going home. Perhaps the implication of pain serves to heighten the quality of recaptured joy or perhaps there is released in the mood of the moment, a tendency to envelop all that may have been painful in a kind of a fuzzy and redeemingly benign way.
The hurts, annoyances, disappointments and irritations, if they are permitted to intrude at all, are filtered forgivingly through an 'it was all for the best' attitude or, at very least, are patronized in terms of a 'great human comedy' metaphor. Most of us would perhaps be inclined to translate our desire to come home in terms of what the biologists name, the 'homing instinct' and think of it as one of the many vestiges of our Darwinian past. An instinct is supposed to be an innate psycho-somatic disposition which determines the course of action of its possessor. Fortunately or unfortunately, the growth of a rationalized social order which we define as the modern civilization, has uprooted a number of instincts that had earlier occupied a place of pride in our minds.
However there is no gainsaying the fact that the instinct that goads the Siberian cranes to return to their homes across thousands of miles, also impels us to make a beeline to the nearest airport to be carried home after long or short stints out. Gray's lowing herd and the busy executive driving franatically home after office hours, are both inflicted with the same instict. Is it not pertinent to ask ourselves at this stage the most obvious question, namely, what are the signals that beckon us home? Or more explicitly, what does a home promise to offer us? From the times of the earliest dugouts and caves to huts and sod houses to mansions and skyscrapers, the idea of home has never deserted us. It has stuck to us on horseback and camelback, on lunar trips and round the world trips, and through war and peace alike.
In its crudest essentials a home is like a house that offers comfort, shelter, and security. But an old Chinese proverb asserts that it takes a woman to make a home. Remember how John Pendleton implores Pollyanna in Haley Mills' book of the same name to stay with him, all the while wrenching his heart before her: It takes a woman's hand and heart, or a child's presence to make a home Pollyanna, and I have had neither. We are left to wonder what was uppermost in the mind of Ulysses when he turned his back upon the world after twenty years of wandering in alien lands. Was it the need of a shelter at the fag end of his life or the compulsion of comfort for his tired bones, or the security of a still hearth? Or was it a wrenching at the heart nudging him to go see an aging wife whom he had chosen to abandon for the best part of her life?
In one of his poems, Robert Frost says that home is the place, where, when you have to go there,they have to take you in. Nobody questions you why you have come back home. It is an unwritten law. Home is where you are always welcome. It is also a fact that there are a lot of people who come home literally to roost and die. But for many more people a home transcends the familiar bounds of a house in the articulation of their life's purpose. For them home coming is a kind of, what the psychologists would like to phrase, a return to the womb in search of their identity. These trips are symbolic of an attempt to peep into the past with a view to establishing what Eric Fromm terms a prehuman harmony with the instinctive past from which he tore away at the dawn of civilization.
Wordsworth takes us further back to our pristine origins. See how he expresses it in his Ode To Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood:
Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Looks like the simple looking act of homecoming arises in response to a deep-seated nagging ache in everybody's heart. In 1965, the abolishment of the Asian Exclusion Act, which had been in force since 1924 in the United States of America, saw droves of my countrymen heading to the far off shores. There was a clamor of 'brain drain' and 'capital loss' all around. Now they are coming back home, again in droves. The social circuit is rife with the talk of 'brain gain' and 'capital gain'. It will be totally off the mark to judge them by appearances alone. Appearances may be and are deceptive more times than we allow them to be. Opinions always vary and they certainly do now, on the motives of homecoming. But I'm sure all would agree with me on the point that one can't come home unless one leaves home to go out.
True to the french maxim extremes meet, homing and roaming form an ambivalent unit, each being progressively an extension of the other. As a unit they happen to be two very important partners of the compulsive process of our evolution. All of us are on a voyage that is homeward bound. We leave our homes to reach our home! We are all trodding the globe in search of the unnameable and returning home to claim it! We are all like Santiago in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist who travels half the world in search of the treasure that is waiting for him, back at home! Like him again we feel like addressing the sky: "You old sorcerer, you had known the whole script all along. Couldn't I have been spared all the troubles and tribulations, all the tyrannous heartbreaking and rigorous pathbreaking?" "No", he is likely to say, "If I had told you, you wouldn't have broken the barriers of sound to stand at the frontiers of light in search of your home".
St. Augustine outlines in his Confessions: Men travel to gaze upon mountain heights and the waves of the sea, broad-flowing rivers and the expanse of the ocean, and pass by themselves. There are three types of potentialities in a man. One that others think you are capable of achieving and the other that you think you are destined to unravel. Very few are keen to unveil the real potential hidden inside him--the potential to know himself. In Brihadaranyaka Upanishad it is stated: Whosoever departs from this world without having realized his own inner world, to him, life has been of no service. It remains unlived like unrecited Vedas or any other undone deed. This is in sync with what Socrates asserts: It seems to me ridiculous, when I am not able to know myself, to investigate irrelevant things.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
The reason is not hard to see: Going home and nostalgia have shared a common past for almost three centuries now. It was sometime late in the seventeenth century that a Swiss physician, Johanannes Hofer by name, found Swiss mercenaries fighting far from their native land in the ranks of one or the other European despot, afflicted with lability of emotion and a generalized languishing away. Though the more straightforward homesickness from the German heimweh was ready at hand, he found it somewhat wanting and coined a new word from the Greek nostos, to return home, and algai, a painful condition. Thus nostalgia had originally meant 'a painful yearning to return home'. Wasn't Keats' Ruth being nostalgic in the original sense of the word when 'She stood in tears amid the alien corn' in his Ode To A Nightingale?
Quite a significant word in the phrase 'a painful yearning to return home' is the word 'painful' which imparts a special meaning to the act of returning home. Some of us may be willing to testify that at one or the other time in life they had felt a subtle twang at the strings of their heart, besides a generalized feeling of buoyancy, at the sudden mention of the idea of going home. Some may prefer to describe it as a 'delicious pain' while others may call it an unnameable pang that tinges their joy of going home. Perhaps the implication of pain serves to heighten the quality of recaptured joy or perhaps there is released in the mood of the moment, a tendency to envelop all that may have been painful in a kind of a fuzzy and redeemingly benign way.
The hurts, annoyances, disappointments and irritations, if they are permitted to intrude at all, are filtered forgivingly through an 'it was all for the best' attitude or, at very least, are patronized in terms of a 'great human comedy' metaphor. Most of us would perhaps be inclined to translate our desire to come home in terms of what the biologists name, the 'homing instinct' and think of it as one of the many vestiges of our Darwinian past. An instinct is supposed to be an innate psycho-somatic disposition which determines the course of action of its possessor. Fortunately or unfortunately, the growth of a rationalized social order which we define as the modern civilization, has uprooted a number of instincts that had earlier occupied a place of pride in our minds.
However there is no gainsaying the fact that the instinct that goads the Siberian cranes to return to their homes across thousands of miles, also impels us to make a beeline to the nearest airport to be carried home after long or short stints out. Gray's lowing herd and the busy executive driving franatically home after office hours, are both inflicted with the same instict. Is it not pertinent to ask ourselves at this stage the most obvious question, namely, what are the signals that beckon us home? Or more explicitly, what does a home promise to offer us? From the times of the earliest dugouts and caves to huts and sod houses to mansions and skyscrapers, the idea of home has never deserted us. It has stuck to us on horseback and camelback, on lunar trips and round the world trips, and through war and peace alike.
In its crudest essentials a home is like a house that offers comfort, shelter, and security. But an old Chinese proverb asserts that it takes a woman to make a home. Remember how John Pendleton implores Pollyanna in Haley Mills' book of the same name to stay with him, all the while wrenching his heart before her: It takes a woman's hand and heart, or a child's presence to make a home Pollyanna, and I have had neither. We are left to wonder what was uppermost in the mind of Ulysses when he turned his back upon the world after twenty years of wandering in alien lands. Was it the need of a shelter at the fag end of his life or the compulsion of comfort for his tired bones, or the security of a still hearth? Or was it a wrenching at the heart nudging him to go see an aging wife whom he had chosen to abandon for the best part of her life?
In one of his poems, Robert Frost says that home is the place, where, when you have to go there,they have to take you in. Nobody questions you why you have come back home. It is an unwritten law. Home is where you are always welcome. It is also a fact that there are a lot of people who come home literally to roost and die. But for many more people a home transcends the familiar bounds of a house in the articulation of their life's purpose. For them home coming is a kind of, what the psychologists would like to phrase, a return to the womb in search of their identity. These trips are symbolic of an attempt to peep into the past with a view to establishing what Eric Fromm terms a prehuman harmony with the instinctive past from which he tore away at the dawn of civilization.
Wordsworth takes us further back to our pristine origins. See how he expresses it in his Ode To Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood:
Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Looks like the simple looking act of homecoming arises in response to a deep-seated nagging ache in everybody's heart. In 1965, the abolishment of the Asian Exclusion Act, which had been in force since 1924 in the United States of America, saw droves of my countrymen heading to the far off shores. There was a clamor of 'brain drain' and 'capital loss' all around. Now they are coming back home, again in droves. The social circuit is rife with the talk of 'brain gain' and 'capital gain'. It will be totally off the mark to judge them by appearances alone. Appearances may be and are deceptive more times than we allow them to be. Opinions always vary and they certainly do now, on the motives of homecoming. But I'm sure all would agree with me on the point that one can't come home unless one leaves home to go out.
True to the french maxim extremes meet, homing and roaming form an ambivalent unit, each being progressively an extension of the other. As a unit they happen to be two very important partners of the compulsive process of our evolution. All of us are on a voyage that is homeward bound. We leave our homes to reach our home! We are all trodding the globe in search of the unnameable and returning home to claim it! We are all like Santiago in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist who travels half the world in search of the treasure that is waiting for him, back at home! Like him again we feel like addressing the sky: "You old sorcerer, you had known the whole script all along. Couldn't I have been spared all the troubles and tribulations, all the tyrannous heartbreaking and rigorous pathbreaking?" "No", he is likely to say, "If I had told you, you wouldn't have broken the barriers of sound to stand at the frontiers of light in search of your home".
St. Augustine outlines in his Confessions: Men travel to gaze upon mountain heights and the waves of the sea, broad-flowing rivers and the expanse of the ocean, and pass by themselves. There are three types of potentialities in a man. One that others think you are capable of achieving and the other that you think you are destined to unravel. Very few are keen to unveil the real potential hidden inside him--the potential to know himself. In Brihadaranyaka Upanishad it is stated: Whosoever departs from this world without having realized his own inner world, to him, life has been of no service. It remains unlived like unrecited Vedas or any other undone deed. This is in sync with what Socrates asserts: It seems to me ridiculous, when I am not able to know myself, to investigate irrelevant things.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
