What does Home mean to you?

And yet, as his own death drew near, Sakyamuni turned again towards the north....“ Come Ananda, let us go to Kushinagar”. Like the rest of us, perhaps he longed for home  -  Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard.

Let’s go home! – Dr. Ryan in Gravity

What does home mean to people? 

Is it the house that one stays in or owns?

Is it the place where your family or parents are?

Is it the place where one grew up?

Or the place where your ancestors came from?   

Is it just being with the person you love?

Or is it just being yourself with your partner or your friends?

Is it a place where you feel you belong?

Or is it the feel of the air and the earth that is so familiar to you?

We humans are strange beings. At one hand we are forever trying to explore and reach the unknown and then again going further – from the continent of Africa and now to Mars and beyond. On the other hand, there is always an unrelenting need to find one’s roots, a place one can call home.

I have often wondered if the second generation of Tibetans in India feel the same sense of rootlessness that their parents must have felt in an alien land. What about the Bengali and other communities who were forced to leave Assam and Meghalaya even though they had lived there for generations....did they find their roots back in Bengal or do they still pine for the smell of the hills? Despite so many stories and movies, will we ever really understand what people must have felt when the two communities were suddenly uprooted during Partition? Does every Jew in the world feel the need to visit Israel, just so that they know it’s their home and a place which is supposed to be a safe haven for them always? If ever they find peace, will the people of Gaza strip and Palestine who have grown up in an era of strife feel that freedom and comfort to travel and venture out? How deep was the pain of Navratilova who had made America her home but could not stop her tears when the Czech national anthem was played?  

When people ask me where is home, I am often stumped. My connection with the state of my community or ancestors is very low because I have never lived there. Except for nostalgia and good memories of a carefree childhood, the place where I grew up has no charm left for me anymore. I do miss the autumn and winters of Delhi but it’s a city I will not like to go back to anytime soon. I have found my warm fuzzy corner in Mumbai but I still have to grow my roots here.

When I grow old and my parents are not there anymore, I do not know where home will be then. But like the Buddha, if there is any place that I would want to go back to at the end of my years, it will be to the high snow bound mountains up north.  It’s cold winds, the cerulean skies, warm afternoon sun and the towering snow peaks all around; that is what I want to feel and that is what I want to see when I finally close my eyes. At home, at peace.

Understanding the Other Side:

I recently met an academician and our conversation veered from Geology (her subject) to Climate Change.  She, like many geologists across the world vehemently disagrees about anthropogenic climate change or change in climate due to man-made reasons. This piqued my interest because for the first time I realised that in my eagerness to talk about environment, I had forgotten to look at the other side of the coin!

She insisted that the ‘issue’ of climate change as it stands in the global economic and political forums is a hoax / hogwash because all these so-called changes in climate discussed ad nauseam in media are just a part of Earth’s natural processes. She rattled off names of scientists, researchers, and agencies etc who have worked on this and though I had not heard of any of these names, I vigorously nodded my head just so that I didn't sound so ignorant.    

I asked her for some reading materials which she happily acquiesced to. What I read is just a tip of my ignorance iceberg but they are definitely very interesting; enough for me to want to know more and oh yes, debate!

In short, NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change) was formed to counter IPCC’s (International Panel on Climate Change) claims about Climate Change. According to HIPCC, IPCC is funded by governments through tax payers’ money and hence has vested interests. The scientists with IPCC usually move around in swanky hotels in exotic locations and use computer generated models to predict catastrophes which don’t have any scientific backing. HIPCC and other independent geologists have also alleged that IPCC has changed or ‘corrected’ data to prove future disaster scenarios and dramatic rise in sea levels. To every claim that IPCC has come out with, HIPCC has come out with a counter claim proving exactly the opposite. So as per HIPCC and many other geologists / scientists, there is no rise in sea levels or will be (infact it has dipped in some places), there are no glacial melts, no extreme weather patterns, no crop failures or ecosystem changes which cannot be explained as basic natural cause and effect.  This group believes that increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is infact good because it will help in regeneration of forests and produce better crop yields (to name a few). So, life is good as it is and we should continue in the same way.

Fair Enough!

Source: adaptationresourcekit.squarespace.com

Though I have hardly read or understood enough and I am Definitely not an expert on this subject, I am left wondering why so much of this debate is only centered around greenhouse gas emissions. Should it just be about CO2 emissions or about overall environmental degradation? Yes, Earth has a cyclic pattern of heating up and cooling down. When average temperature rose a 1000years back, it wouldn't have made much difference because they had more forest cover, lesser ‘emissions’ to counter the rise.  Now with most forest cover gone, polluted rivers, plastics galore, and dams blocking rivers etc, will not the natural change in Earth’s temperature affect many things?  And what vested interests would governments have in changing a perfectly established highly capital intensive economy to something which might not be so in future?

As for me, in the four decades of my nearly ignorant life, I have seen enough damage to nature to not get worried. It worries me that Mumbai’s balmy 30 degrees climate has changed to a hot and humid 36 degrees; that Delhi’s winter has shortened to a few weeks instead of months and that there are hardly any afternoon rainfall in Bangalore these days.

On that day however, despite being on either sides of the spectrum, we both agreed to one thing – that this (the debate on Climate Change) is just another Game!


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To read more on the other side of the debate check out http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/