It’s really fun to be in a hostel for the past five years… away from home the family that you form in the hostel is worth maintaining always. My best of friends are gals from my earlier hostel, I am still very much in touch with them and without telling them events that happen to me I feel absolutely irritable and restless. It’s only when they know about what’s up in my life and vice versa that we feel nice. And to add to the emotional support that I get from these friends any time in my life, the fun and frolic that we had is also worth mentioning. In this hostel too I have a small group of four (we call it our family of four) and the amount of fun we have together is amazing. May it be going to watch a movie to the nearby shady threatre , or just sitting back in the hostel and burning the CDs which any of us must have got as a gesture of love from our college mates, or messaging oil into each others head, or cooking something together, or pulling each other with some cool guy we met, or going out on a shopping spree together, it has been great fun throughout. Just yesterday we cooked maggi with vegetables, given the limited resources of utensils and masala and the frequent powercuts here (we have electric hotplates), it was an ordeal to make it upto the mark. But we managed and defied the long believed theory of ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. Today on Janamasthmi we plan to make ‘halwa’ with most of the responsibilty adhered to me (being a baniya, the expertise of making halwa is supposed to be in my genes), let’s see!!
And then since all of us are now going to embark the ‘grihastha’ phase of our lives, so the educative sessions on sex, life-after-marriage, how-to-keep-husband-happy and how-to-balance-career-with-family are very much on the daily agenda of chit-chats in the after-dinner talks. We have our own shares of fights too, one surely will arise after we watch every movie together, as our personal reviews of it differ most of the time. Though it’s true that our tastes are almost similar but then English language distinguishes similar from equal, so fight is inevitable! And yes we fight too when we discuss world-politics as well, we see Mr. Bush differently, we see Natwar Singh differently, we see Sonia Gandhi differently, and we see L.K.Advani differently, the difference being mostly subtle as broadly we tend to agree, or may be agree to disagree!
I have evolved as a human being staying in the hostel. Being a Cancerian, I have always felt too inclined to my family with my dependence on them for every little thing. And so had it not been for my hostel life I would not have been the person I am today, independent and ready to take on the world. Staying in a girls hostel does tend to instill a sense of feminism in you, but I have kept a watch that I do not get too driven away by it. I believe in equality but not chauvinism of any form, and so there is not much space for feminism in my ideology. I do not endorse exploitation or dominance either by a man on a woman or vice versa as well.
Overall it has been fun to be in a company of girls from small corners of the country who just had dreams to get them this far in life. They may have had to fight for being allowed to be sent back for further studies every time they go back home to spend a vacation, or they may have been fighting with the financial crunch as their father has three more daughters to take care of, or they may have been fighting the constant nag of their parents to get married, or they may be fighting the simple disinterest in letting them study, these are the girls who are determined to make a difference and do not let their tension show on their faces. With heads held high, and eyes dreaming of success, they form the backbone of our society!
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