Guests and hosts
By: K S SPillai
Religions ask us to treat our guests with kindness and respect. Honouring guests is said to be a sign of strong faith. We are advised to welcome them personally and make their stay comfortable.
The hosts are also prohibited from asking uncomfortable questions to their guests and are expected to be patient with them to create a calm atmosphere. One said that God would bless us if we invited strangers, the poor, crippled, lame and blind to our homes as guests.
Some religions ask us to consider the guests as gods and give us the slogan ‘AtithiDevoBhava’. Serving others helps develop a consciousness of giving up and letting go of attachments. For various reasons, guests are also asked to limit their stay with the hosts to a maximum of three days.
I remember seeing a Hindi movie with the theme ‘AtithiDevoBhava’. An old man reaches the home of the wrong host with the same name by mistake as the visit was taking place after several years. Though the host does not remember his eccentric guest, he follows the dictum of ‘AtithiDevoBhava’ and treats him well, and the film ends on a happy note when the mistake is realized.
Some people detest work and live a comfortable life in the hospitality of their relatives. During my childhood, we, the children, were happy when guests arrived and stayed for many days as we were also served special foods. If it was the winter season that required warm water to bathe, the non-working geyser and other gadgets in the house would be repaired to make their stay pleasant.
Years later, when I settled with my family in a North Indian state, we became a part of people with common problems. We looked forward to Sundays and Tuesdays to visit our friends or to receive them.
Sundays were holidays for government offices and schools and Tuesdays for factories where several people from our native state worked. As electric lines were maintained on Tuesdays, many parts of the city would be without electricity throughout the day.
On holidays, children would finish their homework early and women would be free of their chores, ready either to visit others or to receive them. The visits would be long, and the womenfolk would assemble in the kitchens to prepare some Kerala food items while exchanging gossip. All would spend hours together, exchanging news, and drinking tea several times. Everybody would be happy at the end of the meetings and would decide where we would assemble on the next holiday.
Those who returned after visiting their homes in Kerala would be our special targets as they would always bring some food items from home and eat them with their guests.
The situation has undergone sea changes, making us nostalgic about the old days of personal visits. First came the black-and-white television sets connected to large antennas on the terrace. The reception would be hazy, as the nearest television transmission centre was far away, and it required someone to go to the terrace frequently to adjust the antenna. On holidays popular films, television serials, and film songs were telecast, and all would prefer to watch them rather than attend to guests.
Many things of daily use were in short supply during that time. It took many years after registration to get a landline telephone. There was only one central government agency that provided telephone services. Then the situation started improving, and private players were allowed to provide STD and local telephone services to people.
Afterwards, mobile phones with several facilities appeared, though the rates were high. As smartphones with facilities for video calls appeared, it was the end of the postman and sending telegrams or writing letters. WhatsApp messages, text messages, emails, and other social media platforms ended the need for personal visits. Video calls could be made outside the country to speak to people settled outside the country.
The situation has become so bad that now friends see one another only when one is ill or has breathed his last.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’, his articles and short stories have appeared in several national and international publications)
