Home, sweet home!
This is an age old adage, and applied across continents, societies, and civilisations. But the concept of home has undergone a dramatic change according to the process of development and, depending on the level of development of the society in which context we talk of home.
How different:
Recently there has been a survey of the students at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Here the response of the American students is just dramatic, and otherwise would shock any Indian.
Well most of the students reported missing home. But the home they are missing is not the home we usually understand by the term.
We understand by home the place where our parents live, and our brothers and sisters stay. It is also a place where our parents and elders have put structures for our comfort, protection and livelihood.
The American students are missing home of a different kind.
Majority of them said they miss home, but at the same time they report realisation that the homes they have grown with and in are not the homes they miss.
They also report realisation that the homes of their parents are in fact not their (students) homes. So to an average American college student, the concept of home is the one he/she is going to establish and not the parental one; the home in dream for future and for endeavouring towards.
Our Students:
If we ask any Manipuri student studying inside or outside the State, but staying away from home, as to whether he/she misses home, the response would be the same as that of the American students.
But the connotation of home would be very different. The home he/she is missing would invariably be the parental one, except in some unfortunate circumstances. In any case, it would be the kind of home the American students have in mind.
The Question:
Now that so many of our students are studying outside the State, missing home and involving huge expenses, we now need to ponder the relative dilemma of the students so that we might be able to appreciate the comparative socio-economic realities.
The American situation has not come about overnight but has been the pay-off of the economic advancement the country has experienced on a massive scale particularly from about the last quarter of the century just gone by. We even have stories of the parents of this year's Nobel Prize winner in economics surviving on the support of his grand-parents during the thirties of the last century.
The uncertainty and dilemma an average college student in America faces is not the uncertainty of not finding a job, but one of where he would be placed at which level of the competitive scale at the end of the day. He/she wants to land in a job better paid than his/her peers.
This is where our students are put in a much more pitiable condition than their compatriots in the American soil. Our students miss their parental homes, miss their brothers and sisters. They miss their leikais, villages and the locality.
They really long to go back to these places after graduation, and wish they could do something for their own places. Such is the lovely commitment and attachment they have to their places. But they know as well that their future is doomed once they are back and get confined to these places.
There will hardly be any job, any scope for applying whatever modern knowledge they have acquired, and any scope for improving upon the livelihood their parents had assured so far.
They would feel failed in proving their worth to their parents, their peers and above all the local population. In a society like ours where everybody knows everybody else, these are absolutely important.
So the option of returning home to the State of Manipur is increasingly becoming a non-option for our students studying outside the State. Even for the students studying now in Manipur, they are now increasingly searching for opportunities to move out in search of job and livelihood.
In these circumstances the dilemma and uncertainty an average Manipuri student faces are much severe than those faced by their American friends.
Our students miss their parental homes and locality, but they cannot afford to go back as futureless as that would be. On the other hand, they have also to compete in a more rather than less strange environments to eke out their living.
Wish our political leaders sincerely applied their mind and commitment to make our Manipur a little livable.
* Amar Yumnam writes regularly for The Sangai Express. The writer is at present a Visiting Scholar at University of Southern California, Los Angeles and can be contacted at [email protected] . This article was webcasted on December 20th 2006.
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