[Answer]-Why absolute paths in Django settings

When in doubt… check the documentation. According to the Django Docs,

It’s simplest to use absolute paths (i.e., directory paths that start at the root of the filesystem). If you want to be a bit more flexible and decoupled, though, you can take advantage of the fact that Django settings files are just Python code by constructing the contents of TEMPLATE_DIRS dynamically.

So to ensure portability while also ensuring the use of absolute paths, you generate the path dynamically as to avoid going down the awful road of hard-coded paths. As stated by @karthikr in his comment you can do something like,

TEMPLATE_PATH = os.path.join(PROJECT_PATH, 'templates')
TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    TEMPLATE_PATH,
)

where 'templates' is a directory within your project that contains your various html templates.