MMM Hall of Residence. I’d been here many times but I never in my wildest dreams thought that I’d have to stay in this. There were no seniors here. No interaction with seniors. No wing culture. No late night parties. Just rooms. Scores and scores of rooms. It is the largest Hall in the campus with 800 rooms, i.e. capacity for 1600 students. The Hall is divided into four blocks each with 200 rooms equally divided in four floors. There are two messy messes, each for two blocks with the worst foos imaginable by the human brain. Some people disagree. They say normal human beings can’t even imagine the quality of the food served here. Nah, it was more like thatwe were served to the food. However, it all made MMM sound very organized.
It was not. Students were put there randomly and there were M.Tech students spread throughout. I wouldn’t have had a problem with this if there hadn’t been a ‘culture’ in MMM that undergraduates did not talk with postgraduate students and 25 year olds living in between 18 year olds did somehow prevent a ‘wing’ from forming. So people here interacted with each other less than that in my previous hall. Plus, there were no extra curricular events by the hall. In my previous hall there was so much to do that I would find myself running like Haile Gebrselassie throughout the day and here all people do except going to classes is… ummm… well there’s nothing exactly people do here! They live. And I was going to become one of them. Maybe. After going through the ways of Kharagpur last semester (with all my luggage that is) I’d learnt a very important lesson. And the song being played in the car can express it all in perfect words,
‘Hum hain is pal yahan. Jaane ho kal, kahan.’
The driver helped a lot in loading mine and Sagar’s stuff into the car. Most of the space was taken by the two mattresses we had. I wondered if I’d been insane to think that I found these to be small once upon a time. Then we had four big suitcases, two big bags and a lot of loose stuff like stationary, copies, calculators, extension cables, cell phone chargers, footwear, laundry bags, toiletries (including buckets), brooms, etc. We decided to get the room cleaned before shifting in and voila, when we opened the door we found that the room was already occupied by scores of extra pillows, mattresses, buckets, etc which the hall sells to new boarders. We had been ‘by mistake’ allotted that room. So after going through all the paperwork again we were given RR – 109. We got it cleaned and shifted in. Then I sent the driver back home. God! He’d helped us like a coolie. I immediately called up dad asking him if I should give something to him. When that was done I came back and started unpacking. I wanted to settle in as fast as possible as I hate to see things messed up and disorganized. After ten minutes when we closed the door we found that the almirah was locked. We went to the Hall office again and even they did not have the key to it. So we decided on breaking the lock and as soon as the lock was broken we saw a treasure of beer bottles and cigarette packets. The manager standing behind said an “OOPS” loud enough to make Sagar jump and quickly ran away. We were left standing there trying to understand what just happened. Another question on my mind was if the manager would let us keep the beer or would negotiate. Maybe the beer was his and he was scared because we had caught him. I wouldn’t have told anyone if he gave me a few bottles. But my fantasies were interrupted by his screeching voice, ‘Err boys, there has been a mistake. This room is already allotted to someone. They’re not back from the winter vacations yet. There is some problem with the computer. You boys have to shift to RR – 310.’
Silence. After 30 seconds of cold silence where I had closed my eyes counting numbers trying to calm down, I finally said, “But this is wrong. We have shifted here. There is too much stuff. We cant shift AGAIN.”
“But this room has already been allotted to someone else.”
“They can come back and go to RR – 310. There’s not much stuff they’d have to take from here. We’d have to shift with all this luggage you see here.”
“But they have been living here. It’s a computer fault. This room has not been allotted to you. I’ll send my boys to help you shift.”
After 15 minutes of bargaining we finally got our rights. The new room would be cleaned and our stuff would be shifted by the Hall within one hour. Still we had to be along with anyone taking our bags and we had to run up and down the stairs ten times before finally everything was done. I unpacked quickly. I had reached Kharagpur at 11 AM and now it was 6 when I finally had some rest. The room is good apart from a non functional tube light, a crow nest in the bathroom, a leaking tap and no friends. Still, I found the room better than any of the ones I’d previously been through. So I began a new semester in a new room waiting for the new year party. I don’t see any reason if by which I can be made to shift again but you never know. I’ve come to believe that living in IIT is quite similar to the nomadic culture. The only difference is that we use Gtalk instead of yelling YULULULU HU HA HE to communicate. You never know where you’ll be tomorrow.
