*What is PERMANENT ADDRESS.....???*

 *What is PERMANENT ADDRESS.....???*

By Javed Akhtar 

   

*Once people leave, a home becomes a house*. Initially, I didn’t feel like selling, and now I don’t feel like going. Time has taken away ten of its fourteen occupants.

I walk around our neighborhood and see similar fate of so many homes once full of life now replaced by Apartments wuth children Apart,Parents Apart..  omg all crows lying still.

Why do we stretch and stress to build houses? In most cases, our kids won’t need it or worse, fight over it. 

*What is this human folly of attempting permanent ownership of EMI Apartments  in a leased life given by God with an uncertain tenure given by a landlord whose terms are non-negotiable and there is no court of appeal*

One day, all we have built with love and EMIs will either be demolished, fought over, sold, or lie in ruins. 

Every time I fill a form that asks for ‘permanent address’ I smile at human folly. 

There is a Zen story that an old monk walked into a Kings palace demanding he wanted to spend the night in this Inn and the guards told him, “What Inn, can’t you see its a palace?”. The monk said “I came here a few decades back. Someone was staying there. A few years later, someone else took the throne from him, then someone else. Any place where the occupant keeps changing is an Inn.”

George Carlin says *“House is just a place where you keep your stuff as you go out and get more stuff”.* 

As houses get bigger, families get smaller. *When the house has occupants, we desire privacy, and when the nest empties, we crave for company.* 

Birds and Animals must be laughing at us humans who give up living in order to build their dream home and, in the end, depart the Inn they mistook as a Permanent Residence.

*The real folly of human desire!*