My Pensieve

Harry Potter: "What is this?"

Albus Dumbledore: “This? It is called a Pensieve. I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind”

- Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter discussing Dumbledore’s Pensieve

I have been a hostel resident. And at the risk of sounding cliched, I firmly believe that one should live in a hostel once in a lifetime.
 I was a day scholar during my engineering, and my college life was just about OK. Neither did I have a lot of fun, nor was it a learning experience worth mentioning. One could argue that it was partly because I didn’t want to learn, but let’s conveniently put this fact out of the equation!

When I did my MBA, I was a hostler, like everyone else as my college was a residential one. I still don’t say that MBA taught me about life and that hostel is a must because you learn discipline blah blah blah , coz B-school hostels are the antithesis of discipline. But you learn a lot of other stuff..Important and unimportant..And you have a lot of fun.

So about the fun part …

Whether you have a large bunch of friends who drink every night or you have no one to talk to and you spend your time scheming how to butter up to your professor or if you’re someone like me who had a small group of friends and wasn’t interested in any of the above- it’s an awesome experience.

A typical day for me was -Getting up and rushing for classes, skipping breakfast, rushing back to get half an hour of sleep between a break, waking up to realize that I have missed the next lecture too..Then going for the last lecture to overcome the guilt of wasting the day..Followed by heading to canteen and wasting even more time...

It is an amazing feeling to get back from college, head to your friend’s room and do nothing together. And then the nothingness translates into even greater nothingness-a bigger fatter balloon of nothingness if u may …and it never seems to burst.. You come up with ideas to pass time—like gossiping about people, then going to someone else’s room and sharing the same gossip with other people. Then there are the infinite TV Series with multiple seasons and movies and constant begging for those over the LAN.So all in all, life is a waste but we waste it with a lot of pride under the pretense of “experience”.

As the great Osho says, there are so many simple joys in life. This is so true when you are a hostler – For eg

•  Entering a hostel loo to find that its absolutely clean (very rare occurrence even in a sophisticated B-school like mine)
• You run in to shower at the nth moment before a class and luckily, find an empty bathroom without diving to block it (by a balti) before an equally desperate -to -shower girl misses the chance by  30 seconds.
•  The sight of a Mac D burger at 11 pm… (For me at least .. PS : I am quite materialistic and food brings me a  sense of inner peace and joy that no form of meditation has managed to) My college being far away from the city, . me and my friends would ask students going to city for Mac D Burgers. The college bus carrying students would be back by 11 pm. ....And God knows, I have never craved so much for any food more than those burgers to come at 11 pm. The joy on our faces when we stuffed our mouths with them was something to be seen.In fact, speaking of food- hunger has a new meaning while you are in a hostel.  You are hungry all the time –during regular meal times, and otherwise. Rule of thumb– Whenever there is food in front of you (which is not of the most abysmal quality), you just hog.

About the learning part (yes there was some!!),
 I learnt a lot about how you have to adjust with little things in life. Actually adjusting with people is one of the most important things you learn in a hostel. And quite a unique mix of people u find - some don’t shower for days, some you can’t ever eat with, some whose rooms are so dirty u feel like puking when inside, some who hide their foodstuffs but are the first ones to come in your room when you get home food..haha..But you talk to them, study with them and simply adjust with them.

All these fun times and learning times seem so ordinary when you are in that moment...True, there is nothing unique about them as these are pretty common experiences. Still, I now think that they are important milestones in the story of your life.

Most dramatically, as soon as you are out of college, these moments come to you like flashes of lightening emphasizing the fact that  you were are an idiot not to have realized that they are never going to come back.

And you would be thrust into a life which is largely governed by routine rather than anything else.
The irony is that I find beauty in moments only when they become memories.  

And end up smiling at things only in hindsight.

But what the heck, at least I have reasons to smile to myself.And that's enough, I guess.J