A home away from home?
The following photo essay portrays the hostel rooms of college girls in an attempt to understand the relationship between people and places. It discusses the idea of ‘homes’, the perception of the same and people’s attachments to their own. It presents a narrative through a series of questions captioning the photos that hope to provide answers for the same.
Don’t you find it fascinating? People’s relationship with their homes?
How do they get so connected to a piece of land or a bunch of tiles, four or more walls and a roof or a ceiling?
Is it the chipped paint or the broken knobs? Is it the people around or just the interior décor?
How do some get so attached to a place that they would spend their entire lives there? While some so that they feel the need to change homes every few years or less?
The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘Home’ to be ‘the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.’ But won’t the poets disagree?
As well as these girls who started calling their hostel rooms ‘home’, after less than 6 months of moving in?
But then what about their childhood homes that they left behind? Are they not their homes anymore? Were they ever their homes? Are these?
Can a person have multiple homes? And if yes, does one ‘home’ give you the same feeling as the other?
And if we were to consider home to be a feeling, what makes something feel like home?
Is it love? The comfort? The sense of security and the feeling of belonging?
Then how does a college girl find it in a used room which she has had for 2-some years?
How does she make it her own when she knows it will be someone else’s soon?
Is it freedom and independence that helps? Or the privacy that it offers? Or maybe the fact that the décor reminds her of her old home?
Is that how she feels she belongs? And what if she doesn’t? What if she never did?
Where does she find her home then?
