Developing Bonds and How?! (Guest writer, Rituparna Maji)

hitch-hike verb. Travel by getting free lifts in passing vehicles.

Yes, I hitch-hiked. And that is how I have landed up here, in Puttindies’ (lovingly referred to as Puttu, henceforth) blog. All this, for the sheer thrill of experiencing the unknown, called ‘blogging’.

Now the key questions to be answered are:

1.     What do I write? The way Puttu rattles off anecdotes from close to three decades ago in such great detail; I am quite convinced that I am suffering from Alzheimer's. I don’t even need a doctor to certify it.
One option to counter this problem is to ‘make up’ a story, but then I have never done a sales role all my life to go down that path either!

2.     How do I write? Besides my Alzheimer's issue, I am incapacitated by capability issues. Having been jotting Minutes of Meeting, and slamming accountability in the form of  ‘By whom’ and ‘By when’ in a tabular format for twenty years, bullet point summaries is all I can muster. How on earth does one narrate?

Yet, my ever inflated ego eggs me, refusing to crumple into a lump of shame for not being able to conjure up a thousand odd words. I also see an opportunity cost here – what if Puttu goes on to win the Booker Prize someday? Wouldn’t I miss out on ‘Reference Power’?

Fast forward. I have gulped down a zillion cups of coffee in a desperate attempt to recollect stuff from 25 years ago. I finally settled down to write (in a bulleted, Minutes of Meeting format, of course) about what I reminisce most (read, remember most) about my REC days.

SUBJECT: Developing bonds and how?
DATE: From some day in August 1989 to any day after May 1993.
ATTENDEES: Girls and boys of the Class of 1993.

NOTES AND ACTIONS:

Bonding within the Ladies’ Hostel (LH): 

It is said that camaraderie forms best in the face of adversities. There was no dearth of adversities in LH – the ones that remained etched in my memory are as listed below:

a.    All the nutrition our bodies needed was expected to be extracted from one single source. It was called potato. That was all there was in every meal

b.    Daal was consistently made at near zero specific gravity. Technically, we didn’t need to drink water post our meal because the daal would’ve provided it already

c.    As if expending all that energy to wash ones clothes wasn’t enough, clothes lines to dry them were few and totally deprived of sunlight. Outcome: Wet and semi dry laundry piled up resulting in an unbearable stench. Rains made it worse!

d.    Gates closed even before the sun would set properly. We were PoW (Prisoners of Warden) on a daily basis. It wasn’t without reason that our batch pioneered a fashion show (the first ever in REC) inside LH and ramp walked to Queen’s ‘I want to break free’. It was a runaway hit! (I vividly remember wearing one of those steel chains, meant to secure our luggage in trains, as a ‘contemporary’ neck-piece)

e.    Load sheddings turned on the spot light on the singers. During exam times, it meant studying in candle light. Power back-up was unheard of

f.    Lack of a landline phone inside LH meant walking to the campus guest house to receive weekly calls from parents at a preordained time. We mastered the art of speaking what our parents wanted to hear in no time

We were all in it together. The bonds that developed showed up at midnight birthday parties, in the form of gifts – sugar coated friendship quotes stuck awkwardly on a plastic stand. That was all we could afford to buy those days.







Bonding outside the hostel with the boys:

a)    At culverts just outside the LH

This was the busiest place in the entire campus during LH visiting hours. So much that the frequent lack of space for the couples to sit led to the introduction of strolls. It would’ve made tremendous financial sense for Keshtu to have opened a mobile shack just for the LH visiting hours.
The visits to LH happened for a multitude of reasons as listed below:
1.    To woo the girl of choice into making a long-term commitment - this category had the highest % footfall per capita at all times of the year,
2.    To borrow money out of goodwill - this category spiked in the second half of each month and peaked in its last week,
3.    To borrow notes for photocopying in order to make up for the classes bunked in the entire semester – this category logically peaked just a few days prior to the exams,

4.    To check the general health and well-being of the:

o   juniors by their respective ‘State Seniors’ (as if it was their moral responsibility), and
o   sisters by their respective self-declared ‘rakhi brothers’
Category 4 (both sub-categories included) sometimes converted into Category 1 over a period of time.

At this juncture, I would like to highlight the never published ‘Popularity Index’ (PI) metric. PI of each LH inmate was a rough mental estimate of the number of visitors she received in a week. A higher level metric for PI was the number of times a girl’s cycle/moped’s tyre was deliberately punctured by the boys - in a desperate attempt to form bonds out of coercion.

A special mention needs to be made of the final year visitors during my time.

They were boys who never visited LH, even once, till it was almost time for them to leave college for good; those who remained content throwing chalks at girls in the corridors instead (factoid: had we collected all those chalks thrown at us for years, we would’ve eradicated illiteracy in the whole of Odisha).

I guess realization dawned on these boys that being a ‘LH virgin’ may become a source of mockery for the rest of their lives. This led to a spike in visitors to LH in the last few months of college. Suddenly, the culverts buzzed with added energy, thanks to an accelerated pace of bonding – there were even meals exchanged here during this time!

b)    During train journeys

Train journeys always meant traveling in unreserved compartments. It was either premature closure of college due to strikes (which was often) or sheer laziness that prevented us from buying tickets in advance. This inadvertently meant:
a.     sharing a berth with a minimum of 3-4 other folks often resulting in 1.5 sqft of seating space per head,
b.     chatting away all through the night totally free from the bondage of LH visiting hours (where was the place to sleep anyways?), and
c.     the physical proximity to the girls due to extreme shortage of space being classified as legal and acceptable.

Evidently, train journeys aligned all the stars for bonds to develop, with the depth of the bonds proportional to the length of the journeys traversed.

In trains like Bokaro-Alleppey express, where all one got to eat was bread and cucumber at the stations till the train joined the respectable Howrah-Madras route, there was also bonding through something as simple as sharing of bread! It wasn’t without reason that whenever the train stopped indefinitely at a random station in the middle of

nowhere (which happened often), the boys ran to stock up, often depleting the entire stock of bread and cucumber at that station in a matter of minutes.

c)    During Spring Fests

While the train journey formed bonds state-wise, Spring Fest formed bonds across batches and talents. From asking that most sought after senior to play the guitar for ones singing competition, to spending hours perfecting the dance moves with one's partner for the dance competition, there was nothing that got scrutinized with raised eyebrows. Song dedications during this time also let many cats out of the bag - by way of bringing unknown bonds to the fore.

ACTION ITEMS:

a)    So which of the aforementioned ‘Hows’ applied to you?
b)    Do you have more bullet points to add on?
c)     How many of them want to make you hide under the table?
d)     How many of them still make you smile?
e)    Before I sign off, please be upfront to tell me ‘this post felt as dry and structured as an Annual Report minus the numbers’ (if that was the case) in the form of feedback. At least that will make me think twice before I go hitch-hiking again, and mess up yet another Booker prize worthy friend’s blog.

Interested in reading my other blogs?

How about my ode to old Hindi film music? Which is here --> THE GOLDEN AGE OF HINDI FILM MUSIC.

The first episode is HERE.

Or my eulogy to one of the greatest playback singers of India? SP BALASUBRAHMANYAM.