There was a time when spending an evening with friends did not require a reservation. Children gathered at a neighbour’s house to play board games, relatives stayed over for days, and a cup of tea could turn into hours of conversation. Today, catching up often means finding a mutually convenient date, choosing a café and planning an outing weeks in advance.
For Meenakshi, a 41-year-old homemaker from Malviya Nagar, Delhi, the change is unmistakable. “We had one guest or the other almost every week back then,” she recalls. Friends and relatives visiting from far away would often stay for a few days. Today, she says, people seem to have less time for such visits, herself included.
When neighbours felt like family
Meenakshi remembers a time when children would visit neighbours almost daily. With televisions and video games available in only a few homes, children gravitated towards those houses, gathering to play board games and spend time together.
Urmila Sagar, 61, a retired government employee from Pitampura remembers a similar sense of community. During her school and college years, friendships were woven into everyday life. “They were my shadows; we went everywhere together,” she says, recalling how she spent time with friends almost daily. Neighbourhoods, too, offered more opportunities for spontaneous interaction. People would gather in the evenings and talk, she recalls. Today, even neighbours living next door may not ask each other how they are doing.
For Sagar, the change is partly a consequence of how people live now. Responsibilities have multiplied, leaving less time for everyday interactions. Technology has also altered the need to meet in person. “Whenever we feel like being with a person, we just call them,” she says, adding that this has reduced the need for daily physical interaction.
Opening the door
Hosting, however, has never been entirely effortless. Sadhna Singh, a 45-year-old homemaker from Noida, remembers the elaborate preparations that went into welcoming guests when she was growing up. Her mother, who was raised in a village, would serve fresh, homegrown vegetables and make hospitality feel special.
Sadhna believes busy schedules and smaller homes are among the main reasons people host less frequently. With more people working, finding the time to clean and prepare a house for guests can itself become a challenge.
Meenakshi acknowledges that the expectation of presenting a clean, well-maintained home can create pressure. Yet she says it has never stopped her from hosting. She believes changing attitudes also play a role, pointing to busy schedules, a growing emphasis on privacy and what she describes as a decline in courtesy.
The role of the pandemic
Prashansa Singh, a fashion designer from Noida, believes the pandemic accelerated this shift. She remembers gatherings at home where family members sat together, exchanged stories and gossiped while children played around them.
After Covid-19, she feels, people became less accustomed to social gatherings. Daily routines increasingly revolve around work, returning home and spending time on mobile phones. Even conversations within families, she observes, have become limited.
For Prashansa, what has changed is not just how often people entertain guests, but how they spend time with one another. Earlier, gatherings brought different generations together in the same space, with children playing, elders sharing stories and everyone participating in the conversation. Today, she feels, people are leading faster, more secluded lives, making fewer efforts to organise such occasions. The home, once a natural meeting place for friends and relatives, has increasingly become a space for retreat rather than shared social life.
What a home reveals
Yet the appeal of hosting lies precisely in what it offers beyond a carefully planned outing. “At home you have the warmth and the cosiness of real human relationships,” Meenakshi says. Inviting someone into one's home, even for a few hours, allows them to experience a more personal part of one's life.
Sadhna agrees. A home reveals a person's interests and hobbies through their belongings and surroundings, offering a familiarity that a café or restaurant cannot quite replicate.
It also allows people to share the less polished parts of everyday life. Sadhna believes that planned outings can make social interactions feel almost too perfect, leaving little room for the ordinary messiness of life. Sagar echoes this sentiment, saying that home visits allow people to see one another as they really are, rather than as they appear during a carefully arranged evening.
Making room for one another
The decline of home hosting does not necessarily mean we care less about our relationships. For many, it is simply harder to find the time, space and energy to welcome people in. Yet, as Meenakshi and Sagar reflect, something is lost when spontaneous visits give way to scheduled outings, and conversations become confined to phone screens.
Perhaps bringing back the culture of hosting does not mean recreating the past, but making room for one another in the lives we lead today. It means letting go of the idea that a home must be immaculate or a meal elaborate before someone can walk through the door. After all, the warmth of a home has never really been about the food served or the furniture arranged, but about the people who gather within it.