I always wondered as to what makes a house a home? Is it the Persian rugs, the exclusive carved furniture, silk drapery and the latest electronic gadgets? Many people may have an idea that all this along with a perfect super looking wife and kids would make a perfect home. But I strongly disagree as likings and disliking are what make us diverse and herein lies the beauty of this earth.
For me a home should have a lived-in look, an inviting and welcoming disposition where one might feel free to let his hair down. I enjoy sitting on the low lying bed or sometimes on the carpeted floor or many a times enjoy relaxing on the bare floor to get a touch of the rawness under me. Does it make me really different from the average? For me a home should have books and magazines spread over the floor and the tables, on the beds and where not. I feel stifled if I have to sit for few minutes in a house that is picture perfect as if straight out of an issue of “Inside-Outside” interior decoration magazine and I wonder do the habitants of the house really enjoy living therein or are most of the time worried about putting the house in order?
A picture perfect house is like a Vogue model—picture perfect—on the glossy sheets of the magazine but try living with her for a day and you will see that the picture perfect beauty is only for a short time. An exquisitely beautiful and composed model would look rumbled and ordinary if she has a home to look after and some kids to try her patience as well! Feeling jealous of nice homes and good looking women, you may say. No way. I pity them indeed. How much time and energy they have to spend on maintaining the both! Try living the way I live and you’ll find what a relief it is when you have some other good things to take care of rather than the superficial!
I dread visiting homes where I find everything in place as it seems like a museum to me! You check the catalogue and you go blindly to the place where you’ll find the object of your search. I enjoy searching for things as during this search I get many other things as well that were long back considered to have be been lost! Try experiencing the joy of such an activity and you’ll agree with what I am writing about.
And if a house has no books scattered around, that makes me even difficult to breathe in. I search frantically to have a look for a book around or even a piece of paper that seem to have vanished in thin air or the dreadful cupboards! I wish to run away and go back to my own home that has plenty of these strewn around.
During the period when I was deep into study on account of my Ph.D. work, my room was so full of books and papers that I would jump around to reach my working place that was a rug strewn on the floor where I would work as well as sleep. And interestingly it would not be the books alone that I would be surrounded with but with endless empty cups of tea as well. I would pick all of them only when I wouldn’t have any other cup to put tea in! And the most interesting part is that I fell in love with this arrangement and coming back to old routine, once my thesis was submitted, was quite torturous.
I love my home the way it is and the way it has supported all of us and would NEVER barter it with any picture perfect house shown in the Interior Designers’ magazines!
Straight from the Heart..... 
