Layman’s guide to Boy’s hostel – Part 2

The story goes that before the the Electronic Voting Machines were introduced in India, it was tested in an IIT Chennai hostel. The modus operandi was that they air dropped the EVM into the hostel. And the rest was left to the budding engineer’s destructive testing abilities. A week in the hostel and when no one was able to find a way to change an already cast vote, the equipment was deemed ready to face the worst of the booth capturer in Bihar.

The most hapless souls of any boy’s hostel are the warden and watchman. It’s a shame to the Indian job market that such gut wrenching professions still exist. The watchman had a set of duties which you wish even George Bush the Lesser (as Arundhati Roy prefers to call him) is not inflicted with –

- Whenever there was a call from home to the only landline phone in the hostel (this is a period epic, set at a time when mobiles were as rare as landline phones are now), he had to scream his lungs out to call the relevant person’s name. And of course the relevant person chose just the time to visit the loo wholly unaware of the pandemonium outside. Every vocal excursion of the watchman was followed by a volley of, shall we say, unparliamentary verbals from the other hostellers directed at the watchman; for disturbing them from there sleep or video games or evening snacks or twilight strolls or night crickets or whatever they were doing.

- He was supposed to prevent the hostel inmates (I use the word deliberately) from coming in after 12 in the night. This meant that he had to keep his face perennially directed away from the gate after 12. What could the poor inmates do if the show started at 10 in the night? And these shows were serving the larger purpose of aiding them in growing into responsible ADULTs.

- His job description also included keeping his senses shut tight for some of the, shall I say, indiscretions of youth (political correctness can test your vocabulary like nothing else). So if an inmate comes and slaps him in drunken stupor, he has to guffaw and bear it. Or if a few inmates break the pipe to water tank to postpone the next day’s examination he has to keep his eyes wide shut. Or whenever there are a few words said against him questioning his parentage because he called out someone for phone, he has to pretend that he lost his sense of hearing for those 2.33 seconds. And if he smells liquor somewhere… well, he is trained into not smelling it.

The warden’s lot is not much better. Our warden (who used to teach whenever he was not getting a mouthful from the boys) used to stay cooped up inside his room in the hostel to come out only when he had a class. With good reason too. Boys’ hostel is not the place to exercise your fundamental rights, especially so, when you are dumb enough to complain against a few.

Though we all enjoyed our stay in the hostel, it was not the same for the support staff. It never can be a win-win, can it? Drunken revelry for one is sunken devilry for another!