A beautiful Home by Nehal Ahmad Nadwi

A Beautiful Home

The key aim of this article is to draw attention to the importance of a beautiful home in general, for the citizens of this country in particular. Thus, the introductory part of this article is devoted to the definition of a beautiful home, its structure, its essential elements and its importance in our noisy world. The second section points out to the experience of a beautiful home, why a prison is not a home? To what extent father and mother have their respective role in making a beautiful home? What is the role of a mother in building a beautiful home? The third part is based on the question that whether home is inside or outside us? Where mind finds peace and silence? And finally the fourth part consists of the analysis, observation and bitter truth that why my country is not my home.

Definition of a beautiful home

A beautiful home is a blessed place, where you and your family can be secure, safe and comfortable. You have all you need and share your sadness and happiness. It is a place where you can help and co-operate each other as a family.  Three elements must be there for a beautiful home in my view: safety, security and stability. Interestingly, a beautiful home can be defined as “a home is where a soul is”.

The concept of a beautiful home is multi-dimensional. In my opinion, a beautiful home is like a successful arranged marriage, slow to bloom but secured in the end in its attachment. A beautiful home is a starting point of journey which begins with vague and confusions, confusions which luckily persist to grow into real questions. Where do you really want to reside? What kind of battle you want to fight? What does really mean to be in a beautiful home? These questions become avenues for growth and self-sufficiency.

Being at a beautiful home, it makes you eager, wiser, readier to cope with the challenges of life. It breeds a certain introspection and awareness of environment. It breeds courage, the ability to first identify what one believes and then stand up and fight for those convictions. It breeds hunger, the desire to make most of every experience to have a go each and everyone of us at the apex of the world.

A beautiful home is never peaceful. A resident of beautiful home rather than shying away from the complicated truth of the world celebrates and embraces the complex understanding of the world. It is a journey of growth of conversations that begin inside the bedroom, at dinner table, in the corridor and sometimes in the guest room for doing exactly what you want to do with your life. In fact, a beautiful home is the greatest gift of God, because a beautiful home is where a heart is.

My experience of a beautiful home

It is a place where you feel protected. A place can also become a home with the people you surround yourself with. It doesn’t just have to be about how the place feels, but how the people around you are influencing you.[1] For example, when I started studying in the Bridge Course after completing my graduation (Alimiyat) in Sharia and jurisprudence from Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama, Lucknow, I was surrounded with a group of young Islamic scholars who having been fully aware of the original Islamic sources, could add a new colour in the field of social sciences, arts, managements, law, journalism, etc. It was a place where I discovered a beautiful home.

It was really a beautiful home for me in its true sense. My classmates were just as amazed as I was. They made me feel comfortable and had healthy discussions many times on various issues. My classmates also felt as if the Bridge Course (a course for the graduates of the deeni madaris) was their home and they gave off great positive energy. Home is the comfort found in the past, as you face the unknown of the future. My home will always be my parents’ home. It’s the place that protected and molded me into a person capable of stepping into the world.

Home is not a tangible, touchable or palpable entity that can be grasped, but instead, a value system and egalitarian ideology and fraternal spirit that is taught and can be realized witnessed every day in the confines of a structure. Home is the force that shapes us into the people we are destined to become. Home is the influence that transforms children into capable young adults.

Why prison is not a home?

A prison is not a home simply because it has limited personal freedom. It has a very confined place to live. It could be referred as an incarceration. The society is protected from the offenders by them being confined in prisons, where their behaviors can be monitored, or they can be placed in community-based facilities which are secured and also offer an opportunity for the prisoners to acquire skills and knowledge through work related activities. There are rehabilitation facilities for the prisoners to ensure that the offenders do not get back to law breaking but will have acquired certain skills to help earn a living after the sentence period is over.[2]

Home is where you can be you, where the people you live with love and respect you or where it is blissfully quiet if you happen to live alone. It is a place you can go to after a very long day and feel at peace, you don’t have to worry about being hurt or yelled at neither you will have to worry about being criticized or laughed at. At home you can sit and enjoy wonderful conversations, happiness and peace of mind.[3]

Overall, a place does not necessarily have to be an apartment, house, or a dorm room to be a home. A home is any place where you are comfortable, and feel as if you can be yourself. A home is a place where you just feed off of positive energy and feel free. It does not matter whether your home is outside in nature or in an apartment, as long as your heart is there.[4]

Father and mother must play their respective role in making a home beautiful

I know that Indian culture is still incredibly patriarchal, but I thought a lot of that was more subconscious, i.e. people believe that men and women are equal and that mothers and fathers are equal, but what I believe is that a father has a different responsibility and so as a mother. In other words, they have been created for different types of responsibilities with different capacities. Therefore, they both with strong bond and mutual relations can play a significant role in making a beautiful home. They just have to understand the importance of their role.  . Habits die hard, people are invested in current hierarchies, and therefore change is slow. But for people to come right out and admit that they believe in equal responsibilities with different capabilities.

The most important thing in everyone’s life is discipline. Without discipline one cannot live a happy life, let alone to make a beautiful home. It is the act of living life following some rules and regulations. Discipline is everything which we do in the right way in right time. It leads us on the right path and to the world of immense future possibilities. We all follow various types of discipline in our daily lives. There are many examples like we wake up in the early morning, drink a glass of water, go to washroom to get fresh, do brush our teeth, take bath, take breakfast, go to school in uniform at right time, etc. all are discipline and a key for making a beautiful home.

It is therefore very necessary for the parents to be the master of their home in order to make home a beautiful one. They must impose reasonable restrictions and try to maintain the discipline of their children. Our society really needs a responsible father and mother for a peaceful life and for making an unprecedented beautiful home. They must engage to building unbreakable families and healthy communities. We must provide practical parenting tools through trainings, resources and mentor-ship, and a global, like-minded community intent on bringing heaven home.

 The role of a mother in building a beautiful home

Mothers are, undoubtedly, the backbone of families. Mother’s job is not always an easy one. Mothers have to make sacrifices for the sake of their family and building a beautiful home. Mothers can have their hearts broken. Mothers must be the conscience of young children and are often the brunt of their anger and pain as they grow into adulthood. The great thing about mothers is that they usually understand and love their kids anyways and they of course leave no stone unturned to make her perfect family with a beautiful home.

Nothing can come close to the love that a mother feels for her children. Most women are inherently excellent mothers. Women carry their young before they are born and then continue to nurture them throughout their childhood and even into adulthood. Mothers make sure that their children are safe and happy throughout their childhood. It is the unconditional love that a mother feels that drives these feelings. It is hard to describe the feeling that a mother has towards her children. In fact, most people do not understand unless they become a mother themselves. A famous saying states that "God could not be everywhere and so he invented mothers", these words are a great inspiration to mothers across the world. When all is well, a mother puts her children before anything else, including their own comfort and happiness.

Mothers give an awful lot of support to their children, whether it involves very visible support or simple background encouragement. Not only do mothers support their children, but they also often hold the whole family structure together. This role is not always plain sailing. A mother can also be upset or hurt. Remember that a mother often takes the fallout for the toddler tantrums and the teenage angst. Despite this, mothers, generally, will love their children no matter what they do. So I firmly believe that the role of a mother so extraordinary in making home a beautiful and living heaven. Describing a mother's love is virtually impossible. It is a feeling that can only truly be understood by those that experience it.[5]

Home is a place inside and outside us

So far as the question of home is concerned whether it is inside or outside us? I do believe that that it is both inside and outside us. It is, in fact, a feeling lost and not knowing what to do or where to go. You spend each night in the musky weather on a bench, which you call your bed. As you wake up to the chattering noises each morning you decide which public place will allow you to clean yourself up. People sometimes haunted by the pressure due to certain unavoidable circumstances despite having a luxury home and good lifestyle. Hence, it is pertinent to say that home could be inside and outside us.

Mind finds silence and peace at home

Our lives nowadays tend to be so busy that we have become accustomed to a constant barrage of tasks, inputs, and general noise. Peace and silence are gifts which we usually find at home. It promotes the inner and builds trust. The lack of silence in our modern life results in lack of comfort. Silence gives us the opportunity to listen to others and more importantly to ourselves.

Yet the inner-silence also is very important. Since, it gives us a chance to listen to our inner voices. It helps us to turn our thoughts and focus inwards and live the present moment now not the past not the future. The inner-silence enables us to save our minds from the inane thoughts and eliminate all mental noises. Thus we make our minds calmer. Consequently, we can work and study more efficiently and our productivity will increase.

The mental silence should be the prime goal in our daily life. If your home does not provide you peace, silence and inner satisfaction, it cannot be a part of a beautiful home. It would be better to say that where there is no peace and silence at home, there is no home.

My country is not my home

My country is a beautiful country. It is known all over the world for its unique cultures and traditions. It is famous for its historical heritages and monuments. It was a slave country earlier to the 1947 under the British rule. However, after many years of hard struggles and sacrifices of the great Indian freedom fighters. It got freedom from the British rule in 1947.

Today I am living in a fragmented country. The country is bleeding and gasping under the onslaught and outrage of corrupt politicians, militancy, terrorism, bribery, naked aggression of one political party against another. How it can be home for me? It is completely away from the concept of home. It has affected the growth of the individual as we well as the nation and reduces income. It is a big reason of inequalities in the society and community. It affects the growth and development of the nation in all aspects like socially, economically and politically. In short, we are a crisis nation, and our crisis has a global ramification. So we are looked at today as a source of all crises. So, in order to make my country a beautiful home, it is dire need of the time to curb the corruption and to eliminate the discrimination and to implement equality and the rule of law in our daily life. I do believe that I will succeed in this endeavor.

Conclusion

A home is not beautiful in itself. Our father, mother, sister and many more effortlessly play an important role in making home beautiful one. They sometimes sacrifice their happiness, peace and comfort to make a beautiful home. A beautiful home has, in fact, no particular existence. It may be our home or anywhere else where your heart and soul find peace, amity, unity, freedom of expression, and above all where we have freedom to think afresh, that will be considered as a beautiful home.

-Nehal Ahmad Nadwi 

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[1] https://www.tellingroom.org/stories/what-makes-place-home

[2] https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Jails-Prisons-and-Rehabilitation-F3CVMGXZVC

[3] https://maiaramusings.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/my-house-or-is-it-home-an-essay/

[4] https://www.tellingroom.org/stories/what-makes-place-home

[5] http://freeessaywebsite.blogspot.in/2008/03/mothers-love-essay.html