Half way house ends at same point where it began comment ...........300 words
Answers
The play ‘Halfway House’ is an effective representation of the middle class ethos, the unfulfilled desires and eventual disintegration of the house. The middle-aged couple Savitri and Mahendranath are as much responsible for the chaos in their marital life as they are for the dissipated, directionless lives of their three children Binni, Ashok and Kinni. The play opens with a squabble between Savitri and Mahendranath, with Savitri blaming Mahendranath for the usual kind of disorder that prevails at home whenever she returns back home. The cluttered up, claustrophobic space of the house is one from which none of them can ever escape for long. The inversion of what a house connotes is apparently suggested through a scene which opens with scattered books, journals, scissors and magazine cuttings that are strewn across the living room. There seems to be no relief for Savitri from the disarrayed house or the irresponsibility and callousness that exists amongst the other members of the house.
As the play progresses, one doesn’t know whether to sympathize with Savitri or Mahendranath, for not before long we realize that she holds economic power, being the sole earning member of the family driven as much by materialistic pursuits in a space that gives her freedom; also representing in its turn the forging of a new identity of the working woman in the changing social milieu of the times in post-Independent India. Savitri depends on other men at various occasions, for comfort or freedom. These men are gradually introduced through the roles played by the Second man, her boss Singhania and the Third man, apparently an old, intimate friend of hers, better understood as a lover named Jagmohan. The Fourth man, Juneja is the link to the couple’s past and seems to answer some of the questions raised through the play, trying to identify through a dialogue with Savitri in Act Two, the cause of misery in this house and the reason behind the failed relationship between Savitri and Mahendranath. We will come back to that as we progress through a reading of the play in context.
Answer:
A halfway house is an institute for people with criminal backgrounds or abusive drug use tendencies to learn the necessary skills to re-integrate into society and better support and care for themselves.
As well as serving as a residence, halfway houses provide social, medical, psychiatric, educational, and other similar services. They are termed "halfway houses" due to their being halfway between completely independent living on the one hand, and in-patient or correctional facilities on the other hand where residents are highly restricted in their behavior and freedoms.
The term has been used in the United States since at least the Temperance Movement of the 1840s.
Halfway houses in the US generally fall into one of two models. In one model upon admission, a patient is classified as to the type of disability, ability to reintegrate into society, and expected time frame for doing so. They may be placed into an open bay same-sex dormitory similar to that found in military basic training with fifty or a hundred similar residents in a gymnasium-type setting all going through the same thing at the same time. As the patients become able to increase their skill level and decrease their dependency on support services, the dorm members become fewer to the point where, at the final stage before being able to get their own apartment, the patient may have only one or two roommates.