By Jitender Dabas“Home is not a place… it’s a feeling.” “Home is where the heart is.” The idea of home and our relationship with it has been fairly romantic.
And even more romantic has been the notion of coming back home.
As someone said, “Life takes you unexpected places, love brings you home.” We came back home from school, work, hostel, business trips, interviews and exams, shopping and even holidays.
We stepped out to work, study, do the tough things and came back to the comfort of home.
It was an emotional and physiological recharge.
That’s what home meant to us.
Coming back home always had a higher emotional currency than stepping out.
Until Covid came and changed that.
When the pandemic hit the world last year, we were told to stay home and protect ourselves.
As the fear of corona loomed outside the four walls of home, we transformed it from a cocoon to a bunker.
We created barricades to stop the infection from entering our homes and we stocked up for lockdowns.
Sanitisers at the entrance and scrutiny of who can come in introduced the layer of guardedness to make it a fortress.
The warm invitation was replaced with hesitant caution for even friends and family.
Everything and everyone coming from outside was put through the process of disinfection.
Once the realisation dawned upon us that Covid was not going away anytime soon the hoped of going back to a pre-Covid normalcy evaporated and we started preparing to live with the virus.
And so came work-from-home, study-from-home and do-everything-from-home life.
And that required a significant reset to our idea of home as we had constructed it in our heads and also hearts.
We had to rearrange, recalibrate and repurpose our homes to this new reality.
Till now, we used to go out to ‘perform’.
We got ready at home and went to our different places of performance — school, college, workplace, social engagements, etc.
Home was only for preparation and recharge and not for performance..
except those few times when we invited guests over for special occasions when it dressed up and helped us project and connect.
But even at those times the codes were welcoming and inviting.
Homes and its spaces have always been conceptualised for ease and not necessarily for efficiency.
Home was a place where you could literally waste yourself without getting judged.
Dining tables were for idle chatter, sofas for sprawling.
Home was a place for comfort.
But work from home altered all that significantly .
The home acquired a new function in our lives.
Now, we had to perform from home.
And our homes had to help us do that.
The dining tables had to now help us do Zoom calls and online classes.
Multiple people in the middle-class working homes meant that the living rooms evolved into co-working spaces.
Earlier, we needed areas to bring people together.
We now need places to give them separation.
As homes became the place of performance, the new code for home became productivity.
Every space at home was now evaluated on efficiency and its ability to help us “perform better”.
New furniture was added, old one was reorganised.
Every nook and corner was utilised.
Even the inconspicuous walls and curtains had to play their roles in providing us the backdrops for our performances.
The metamorphosis had happened: from home sweet home to home safe home and then to home smart home.
When the second wave hit us all the home had to step up one more level.
The structure of the house was now re-thought to evaluate its healthcare capabilities — the room that is best for isolating infected people for two weeks so that others could be protected and they can continue their lives.
Even inside our homes the careless ease had to now give way to the discipline of wearing masks & social distancing.
From careless abandon to the protocols of a structured environment.
As a result of all this over the last one year our emotional idea of home has been altered a little.
As the home acquired the less warm codes of a workplace, it no longer remained the place which was about “comfort and ease”.
And hence, even fuelling the reverse desire to go out to get that ‘relief’.
Hopefully, this will change.
The pandemic and its fear will go away completely at some time and we will be back to our workplaces, schools, colleges and hostels.
And the yearning to come back home will also make a comeback.
(The author is Chief Strategy Officer, McCann World Group)