Here’s a question for you: What do you think of as “home”?

Here’s a question for you: What do you think of as “home”?
 
For some, it’s the place they grew up; or, if their early years were a bit more geographically diverse, the childhood home they spent the most time in, or have the happiest memories of. For some, it’s where family is—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. For some, it’s a place they’ve settled and made their own. For some, like me, home is wherever you happen to be living, with maybe a little family that’s come together (comprising beasts both two-legged and four).
 
Today’s story is the second in our December series, Going Home. A little more than a week ago, I was talking to Prem Panicker, the author of this piece and a widely respected thinker and writer, with about three decades of experience as a professional journalist (having been, among other things, part of the founding team of Rediff and managing editor of Yahoo India). “I was thinking of writing about home in the sense that, well, I wake up this year and suddenly realise I don’t really have a home,” he said. He has no idea what to say when someone asks him for that most Indian identification of home—a permanent address.
 
Prem takes us through a series of homes—some happy, some not, some memorable, some not—from grandparents and a home full of family in Calicut (or Kozhikode) in Kerala to parents dreaming of a home of their own in Chennai (then Madras). Through years spent suffocating in the urban middle-class dream, through years quickly gone by in Delhi, Mumbai, New York.
 
It’s a story of roots and rootlessness. Of nostalgia mixed with pain. Read here: https://the-ken.com/story/prem-panicker-going-home/

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