Home is the place where you stand...

'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;

A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,

Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere.

Home! Home! sweet, sweet Home!

There's no place like Home! there's no place like Home!

~ John Howard Payne~

I  have been a nomad for atleast half my life.

My father was in a transferable job and we kept moving from one place to the other ...- Delhi, Dehradun, Mumbai, Basra.

Every city had a charm of its own, 

yet

Every move brought out its challenges and adventures... 

It made me approach strangers and new situations unhesitatingly, make friends at the drop of a hat and adjust to new environment through different schools and social circles, grudgingly, but with a naive acceptance!

Then my parents settled down in North India, 
the place which felt closest to home for them, 
and that became home for me it too....
till I got married!
My nomadic journey and the search for " my HOME" restarted !

From the one room terrace flat as newly weds in Seshadripuram, Bengaluru....

to a 1BHK ( a one bedroom hall kitchen) in Bandra, Mumbai to the bigger residential ancestral home of my husband, where we stay at present....
Every home has been an active witness to my life's journey....

"What is home for me, today ?"

A haven of my own....safe from the eyes of the world? 
A place where I can unwind, be myself ?
Nurture family and create community of friends who fight and love and grow together ...
Dream dreams : big and small...
Clutch a pillow and cry my heart out at night when things don't work out!!


It's so difficult to pin down what EXACTLY home means to me...

It's all of the above, perhaps...An extension of me and more!

Pico Iyer's words come closest to what I feel about home : 

Home is a place where you become yourself, a place where you stand!


"Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. 
More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. 
And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. 
It's the place where you become yourself. 

And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. 

It's the place where you stand!"

~ Pico Iyer~