Home is where Google Street View says it is

"The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home." - David Suzuki 

I'm often asked if I miss home. It's a common question I get as an expat living in India. Undeniably, the topic of home is of far greater interest to me these days now that I've left home behind in exchange for a new one abroad. I still get puzzled looks from Indians when I give them my stock answer. I can tell by their puzzled looks that they either don't like my response or don't believe it, and they press me for further details to confirm whether or not I'm certifiably insane. 

"Don't you miss your family?" they then ask. 

"Yes," I answer. 

"And your friends?" 

"Absolutely," I say. 

I usually pass the test during this initial phase of the interrogation. Family is for most Indians a big deal, after all, maybe even more important than it is for most Americans (I know a few of you are nodding your heads). But this is the easy part. Home is an abstract term, and it means something slightly different depending on who you ask, or even when and where you ask a person. For instance, I feel right at home in this cafe writing. Home is where the heart it, right? 

I'm ultimately dragged, thwartedly, into the annoying part of the Q&A. 

"Why do you not like living in the United States?" 

This question only pops up when I've been too lazy or uncommitted to elaborate at the start by dredging-up a sludge-fest of negative, kill-joy subjects like jingoistic politics, crass materialism, and an unholy host other unpleasantries that I could do without for the remaining of my live-long days. These long-winded explanations of mine ultimately draw comparisons to the conditions here in India. Hopes of subverting one popular Indian perspective (I call it a delusional myth) that life in America is certainly better than living in India, are dashed. Not that I've set out to convince people otherwise. But I won't shy away from pointing out that the "American dream" is about as elusive for 319 million Americans as it would be for any Indian seeking visa clearance to relocate to the world's only rapidly and utterly declining Superpower. There's very little room for David Suzuki's idea that home is a much broader yet interconnected living space called Planet Earth. More importantly, the conversation of what home really means to us on a personal level gets buried by any number of other topics like education and standards of living. 

To be fair, the hypothetical question could be put to me as to what I would want had I been born in India and looking out for my own best interests. Would I then consider the United States a viable option? Who's to say? Hypothetically speaking, I could live anywhere... Pluto - if Plutonians served Ethiopian or Turkish black coffee (or the closest Kuiper Belt equivalent) and provided kick-ass Internet speeds; an exemplary happy hour special wouldn't hurt either. A robot monkey that performs stand-up comedy and cleans up after me would be an added bonus. Fortunately, I don't live in a hypothetical world where any whim could be seriously entertained until mountains erode and the seas dry up out of sheer boredom. Could it be that some of us are born curious wanderers? And shall I take into consideration that we humans may be born inflicted with various strains of the grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side syndrome? Whatever the case, it doesn't answer the question, what is home? 

Google's Street View product recently furnished a partial answer for me, at least as far as nostalgia is concerned. The NSA's corporate partner in the top-secret PRISM programme since January, 2009, Google has been providing the public (and government) with an Orwellian cache of ground-level photography of American streets and homes in the United States since 2007. It's really quite a spectacular achievement, in a Big Brother sense. And the really cool part is that any ordinary citizen with an address in mind may participate in a low-level form of domestic spying. Which is exactly what I did recently when I was thinking about the only home that had been in my family's possession for over 50 years at the time. I wanted to see it again. I wanted to know what was going on there since some other guy bought it. What happened to the yard I used to help maintain there with my uncle? 

Maybe my view of home as a physical location had been skewed from a young age due to my family uprooting and moving to greener pastures several times. As an adult, it's not like I ever settled down and got a 30-year mortgage on a house. I've always been on the move. My interest in travel has lead me abroad, and for the moment, to India. The only place that has remained a constant source of stability has been my grandparents' home. Because no matter where I moved as a child or an adult, I was always able to return there, to where many of my earliest memories were formed. 

When I had stayed with my grandmother to help take care of her for a couple years, I had been perusing Google Street View to see if her house in Dallas, Oregon, had been captured by Google's roving band of merry eavesdroppers. And of course, it had. I zoomed in on the front of the house to the main window where my grandmother usually sat behind half-closed window blinds... and there she was! I could just make out her figure in repose gazing out into the street when the Google car snapped her photo. I had to laugh. It was her favourite chair for viewing the small slice of world just outside her window. It was her portal to the sparse traffic flow and the faces of neighbourhood children who would regularly pass by on the sidewalk. She kept tabs on the political affairs of all the cats and dogs and their numerous turf wars. The four seasons would come and go over the years, and she made that chair her lab in matters of time-lapsed natural observation and arcane reflection. She held court in that chair whenever visitors came. She slept there, dreamed there, and oftentimes awoke afresh and retold tales that I had heard a hundred times before with such surprising vigour that it sounded like the first time. I wish I had taken a screenshot of that photo. 

I used the Internet to return in 2015 (much cheaper than roundtrip tickets!) to Dallas via Google Street View and discovered a completely new picture. Google had updated the address image within the last two or three years. Gone was my grandmother seated at the window. Enter the new homeowner, captured by Google squatting down in the front yard, face down and pulling weeds in landscaping that had been left in extreme neglect. The place looked like a dump. The only thing that was shining was the man's bright red Mustang that was parked in the distant driveway. What a disappointment to see. To quote David Byrne: 

"And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful house!

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful wife!" 

So much for my near-home away from home. It had been turned over to a fat, balding hobbit in the midst of a midlife crisis. 

All was not lost for my spy mission back home. I decided to check out Google Maps and switched it over to satellite mode and zoomed in on my grandmother's address. I was determined to examine every detail I could from spymaster Google's database. From space, the view was not so ugly and depressing. I was amused to see once again the concrete steps of the walking path I had laid in the lava garden I had created. The path meandered in two directions, one path from the side-yard lawn to the fish pond, the other forked out towards the lawn in front of the house. The new owner hadn't wiped away my handiwork just yet - I could still see it all from space - like some microscopic version of the Great Wall of China. 

I'll content myself for now with my wanderer's definition of home, that it is wherever my two feet may take me. I'll always have Google Street View to keep me grounded in retrospect, and Suzuki's one-home-for-all aspiration. But up-sizing our views to incorporate the entire planet and hence all of humanity is a monumental undertaking. Is humanity really up for the challenge, even if the survival of our species ultimately depends on it? We can talk all we like about how air travel and the Internet has made the earth a smaller place, but much work remains to bring this abstract concept to fruition if human kind were to ever collectively refer to the earth as home. The comedian Steven Wright sardonically agrees: "It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it."