In Steven Spielberg's Munich, there is a sequence in which a group of Israeli assassins accidentally run into - and share a room with - Arab terrorists. (Before someone suspects me of tilting this way or that and energetically catches me by the scruff of my neck, let me hasten to add that the words 'assassins' and 'terrorists' are entirely interchangeable here. Please feel free to flip.) The chief protagonist, an Israeli, who is aware of the identity of the Arab, engages him in a discussion. Why don't you guys give up dreaming of a homeland, he asks? After all, there is no hope in hell that you will achieve it!

The Arab looks back in disdain. "People like you who have a home to go back to no matter what, never realise what it feels to have no home to go back to".
I was reminded of this exchange by Jyoti Patil’s post on the people displaced by big dams of Narmada and Sardar Sagar projects; ‘Appeal’.  (gaudhuli.rediffiland.com).

A house – leave alone a home – is not just a structure of bricks and mortar. It is a collection of memories, just as we all are. ‘Here is where I played, here she cut her foot accidentally, and I first saw the baraat from here……’ This is no mere sentimental treacle.
But, perhaps it is a notion difficult to empathise with by members of a transient society, people like me, who are forced to move  their pictures and easy-chairs and potted plants from flat to flat, their memories barely gathering form with the listlessness of a puff of smoke, before it is time to enter another numbered box. But for most of the people of rural India, time still does not leap from a high to high, occasionally plunging through troughs of low and low. (A perfect definition of ‘roller-coasters’, eh?) There are still vast islands where sunrise and sunset are the chief time-keepers and a neighbour is not a name-plate and a grubby door-bell. Where lingering is not malingering and friendship is not a network.

My grandfather who lived in the shadow of a mountain, stayed in the very same house all his life, refusing to abandon it even in perilous times (This was in 1965 and 1971; Pakistanis were paying fiery attention from the skies to his area. And my grandmother was no longer around for saner counsel). For him, house and home were synonymous. 

I suppose that the people displaced by Big Dams are bonded to their homes (and, by extension, houses) by a very strong glue of similar memories and emotions. Their tenancy is not defined by legal grammar; it is purely pure.

And I wonder if any progress justifies severing anyone from his core, built around a billion memories.

And even if it does, only the most loving and generous compensation, offered with every bit of expeditiousness that we can muster, might reach some way to tourniquet the severance.

Thank you Jyoti, for again pointing a compass in that direction.