A Rocking Home

We all crave a bit of land, four walls and maybe a tiny garden to fence it all in and call it home.. The traveller in me was always fascinated by homes people make in unconventional places..

In school, I remember feeling this intense desire to meet an Eskimo so that I could wangle an invitation to his home and check for myself if he actually had carved his home out of blocks of ice. Now, when I was asked to make an igloo's replica, it's another thing that the Mallu kid chose to make it out a scraped out coconut shell and smother the woody igloo in cotton to get make-believe ice.

That I guess was my first brush with unique houses...After my igloo-fascination days came my days of love for house-boats....and did it have anything to do with a demure Sharmila Tagore doing a Kashmir ki Kali on Chitrahaar?? In retrospect, it did have a lot to do with it. Imagine sitting in front of a television as a wide-mouthed young girl in sweltering and humid Kochi, watching a pretty woman rowing a boat filled with flowers on a lake close to snowy mountains. If that wasn't pretty enough, then there were those elaborate boats carved out of wood, that looked the ultimate in glamorous lifestyle.

Ooohh by the way, it is important to know here that just because I am a Malayali, I wasn't born on a houseboat and I haven't lived on one. Somehow I get this feeling that most people planning a trip to Kerala and seeking my advice expected me to be a veteran of houseboats - the kettuvallam kinds!

Imagine my glee watching houses on the waterways of Amsterdam and then my amazement to learn that these floating houses were as expensive or in some cases more than buying property on the land! Now I knew no one who lived on a houseboat, or I would have fancied spending a night in one of them.

Sadly, even though I did manage to travel to Kashmir and enjoy Kashmiri hospitality, it wasn't on a houseboat....I peeked into a few as I took liesurely rides on the shikaara....and it is not like gardens can only be grown if you have a patch of land! Some innovation, a bit of ingenuity and imagination - and home can be on watery foundation but then imagine investing in shikaras or boats like gondolas to get around instead of mooning over a Porsche or a Ferrari?!!