Intra-muralistic pleasures

There is a line of separation between having freakish fun and gearing up for the future. If one needs to violate this line and enjoy both these premises at the same time, one has to look no beyond the one place- Hostel. The name itself brings vivid flashes of dingy rooms with rickety beds, giving you claustrophobic sickness; really bad mess food and the works. But believe me, in veracity there is much more to hostel life than these small intricacies.
When I first entered my hostel I was apprehensive to say the least. I had never been away from my home and at that time, to go to an alien city and live among strangers was a preposterous and ludicrous idea for me. But when I retrospect, I find myself deeply gratifies with the way things shaped up for me. When a person enters a hostel, he leaves behind everything to be a part of a completely new and different world. He is like a pliant mound of clay waiting to be moulded to desired conformation on the hearth called ‘hostel’.
Apart from the fact that the food was outrageous and at times it seemed that the mess workers were contractually bound to see to it that the inmates lost their appetites, everything else was wonderful. It seemed like a cultural summit, where everyone was uniquely different in terms of background, castes and creeds, yet the purpose was same- to grow up to be a successful human being. In spite of the huge cultural differences and upbringings, everyone gelled together. A hostel epitomizes the really pretty picture that the makers of constitution had in mind, when they concocted secularism into existence.
In hostels you are away from the perfectly sheltered lives of your homes. You start to feel lonely in the crowd and that’s when you develop instincts of survival. Somehow hostel life seems to be in contention with the Einstein’s theory of relativity. There is no ‘survival of the fittest’ but rather a ‘survival to be the fittest’. Everyone tries to help each other in growing mutually.
Hostels are like dream worlds, where everyone knows each other and are willing to look out for each other at the drop of a hat. You learn to be ascetic in certain sense, but that doesn’t deprive you of new indulgences every now and then.
Where there is a rose, there ought to be thorns, similarly in a hostel you are faced with some saturnine moments, clash of interests, egos, emotional outbursts and cynical perseverance but they only spice up hostel life. And more importantly they instruct us how to tackle problems of life amicably and in the interest of both the parties involved.
Insouciance becomes the code when you inhabitate a hostel. The boundations cease to exist. Everyone is a free soul, devoid of any social stigmas and behavioral etiquettes. For the period of stay you experience what it feels like to be free. The place which resembled hell’s alternative at a time, looks like an abode of happiness. It is the place you learn to laugh with others, cry for others and feel for others. The previous mawkishness becomes genuineness and binds you together.
The most important thing that hostel life gives to us is the persona. Most people develop a personality during the say in hostels. I’ve seen introverts simpletons turn into street-smart manipulators. You are a zilch before entering a hostel and you are everything you ought to be when you leave it. I’ve seen boys become men and men become gentlemen and that’s where it is so important for a person to taste the recipe of life in a hostel.
When I started writing this article, the idea was to pay a tribute to what has been a dweller’s paradise but I ended up in giving you a realization of how impassable is hostel life. When I think about it now, words form in my mind-
Men as always come and go,
But it stands rigidly tall;
It treats us a friend not foe,
Until we can take on the fall.