Skip to main content

The Perks of being a Hostel-ite.

It is a Sunday morning and I wake up a few minutes past eleven in my hostel room. Groggy from over seven hours of sleep in the chilly Dibrugarh winter, I promptly turn over and sleep some more. I have an off from work today, I haven't made any plans with friends (yet) and the day is mine as to what I want to do with it.

This sounds like any normal student in his/her early twenties living in a hostel. Hostel life can feel alien and uncomfortable in the begining, but once you get used to it, one starts realising the perks it comes with. Sure, there are rules to stick to and curfews to be met (only girls hostels have those, mind you), but it gives you by and large a sense of freedom and independence not encountered before. 

Most graduate course programmes are over by the time you are in your early twenties, and if you are in med school, you may be in it for a while longer. But throw in masters courses, university programs for post grads and you get the option of staying in "college" and with it, the hostel, for nearabout a decade. 

Sure, your counterparts are probably working now, some may be married with or without kids while some continue to make you feel a twinge of envy with pictures of their travelling experiences on social media. It is inevitable to want to have all of that instead of being stuck in a decade of studying. But there are flipsides to everything,and there is nothing better than a Sunday afternoon to remind you of those. 

As an unmarried, (roughly) thirty year old living in a hostel, your primary concern on a sunday morning is probably to get the week's laundry done/get a haircut/get your car or bike to servicing/getting over last nights hangover etc. Mealtimes can be bizarre and even incase you are feeling extremely lazy to cook a simple meal for yourself, you know there will still be something in the mess that can be passed up as "food". I know people who have spent sundays in hostels without even taking a bath and simply whiled the day away passionately over video games or playing cards. Girls may like to pamper themselves by either visiting salons or trying out YouTube make up tutorials (although not always with the desired results). Studious ones get the day to study while some may choose to unwind over a cup of tea and a good book on Sundays. Reruns of TV series run for hours together on laptops in hostel rooms, while some enjoy movies or sports on television without being told to "switch it off and come to the table for lunch". Table tennis and carrom games go on forever and chai and maggi sustain many through the day. There are really no timetables, no routine...it is as relaxed as it possibly can get, without the pressure of even doing the most basic things as per the conventional time of the day--something that most of have to adhere to at home.

Sitting in my hostel room, as I flip through pictures of a friend enjoying a Sunday brunch in California or another group of classmates post pictures from Goa, I am sure they are having loads of fun- but I realise that having a super relaxed Sunday with myself is no less fun. I have spent more than a decade in hostel, and I have a few more months left to enjoy the perks of being a hostel-ite, topmost among which are my lazy Sundays. :-)



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sisterhood of Medicine

"Sister, when will the Doctor be here?", asked a middle aged man. I turned from my examination table, where I was examining a six year old boy, and replied, " I am the doctor, how can I help you?". The man looked at me doubtfully - I was in a salwar kameez with my stethoscope around my neck - and repeated - " No but Sister, I need my child to be seen by a Doctor  Sir".   This is only one of the many incidents that I- as well as most of my young female colleagues at work- go through on a daily basis. Young female doctors get mistaken for nurses all the time, although the nursing staff always has a specific uniform. The young male doctors, however, do not encounter any such confusion. I have no idea whether I can label this as casual sexism or pure ignorance, but people across social and economic spectrums tend to address female doctors as "Sister" as opposed to "Madam". The men, however, get to be "Sir" throughout.  S
14 comments
Read more

The Matter of the Root.

In a country where your name (more importantly, your surname) is more or less a reflection of your identity- from where you belong down to your caste and religion- imagine having a name that doesn't pin you down to a certain state or territory or region, even. Given that situation, I have now come to simply laugh off the surprised reactions I get when people realise I am Assamese. I have had colleagues who simply assumed I was Bengali for years,friends of friends enquiring which part of Delhi or Punjab I am from and even random aunties at weddings judging me for gorging on chicken because apparently, I am a Marwari! I usually laugh the whole thing off, sometimes even playing a guessing game with the people who seem hellbent on decoding where I actually am from. But somewhere at the back of my mind, over the years, a nagging question has kept building up in my mind--a question I have tried to answer very many times, although not very satisfactorily--- What does being an Assamese
6 comments
Read more

The Saree and its Excess Baggage

As a lanky young girl in her late teens who first stepped into Medical School, I gawked in horror when I was told that I was supposed to wear sarees to classes for a month or so as part of the college tradition for all Freshers. That the whole saree thing was to be accompanied by drippingly oiled hair parted in the middle and braided with the ends tied with fluorescent orange and green ribbons is another story in itself, of course. But for the eighteen year old me, who didn't really care how she looked, the oiled hair wasn't an issue as much as the saree was - simply because I had absolutely no clue how to drape one.  Cut to a little over a decade later, as a newly married woman, the women of my husband's family and extended family are pleasantly surprised as to just how comfortably I drape my sarees, not requiring the help that was very generously offered by a bevy of aunts and sisters in law. Somewhere in these past few years, I fell in love with this quintessential
7 comments
Read more