Saturday 19 May 2012

The year that it was.


Third year started off on this note- “I have to live with four random people in a room. Boy that’s going to be tough! “. After spending a whole year with one of my closest friends as a roommate, having to live with anybody else seemed like a nightmare. All efforts to try and get a better room went in vain. So finally, after a lot of convincing and assuaging, I reached college with a skeptic mind, and the last thing I was looking forward to, was to be living in that “godforsaken room”. The day I reached college, which was a month later than the others, I was welcomed into my room by four smiling faces and a bright “Hiiiiiii”! Out of those four people, one was a good friend, one was “just another girl from my department”, and the other two were complete strangers. For the elaborate person that I am, it took me an entire day to unpack and make my work desk look as “home like” as possible. It’s always nice to wake up to a clean place, even if it is miles away from home. My new roommates looked at me all day long with the “What’s taking her so long to unpack?” look on their faces, and although I could sense it all along, I took my own sweet little time to get done. One of the main reasons leading to my apprehension about living in that room was about how clean my roommates would be. But as luck would have it, they turned out to be innately clean people, and as time went by, we started taking pride in the fact that our room was one of the cleanest in the corridor. Yes, little things like these do matter sometimes. The simple “good morning” and “How was your day?” slowly took the shape of “Come let’s go have dinner” and the standard engineering college line- “I’ll give you company and stay up all night to finish portions for tomorrow’s exam!”. When you understand when to wake your roommate up in case she’s late for class, or get her coffee on the way when you buy some for yourself – these are little things that make you feel the strengthening of a bond, which never existed in the first place. Late night gossip sessions, maggi, Sunday morning clearing up schedules and pulling each other’s leg over almost everything, added to what I now call some good friendship. This room and it’s inmates have seen me laugh out loud, mess up a paper and scream out in frustration, weep after fighting with a friend, handle awkward situations, share the day’s experiences and been with me through one of the most crucial years of engineering. When you end up living with four people whom you cannot take for granted mainly because you started off as mere acquaintances, it makes you realize that you are both praiseworthy and culpable for your actions. You automatically tend to think about how the other person would construe your words, which brings out the reticent mature person within you. It’s times like these when I realize that living in a hostel has made me a much better person for the good. As the year comes to an end in another day, I will stick to the cliché of “how time simply ran past”, because every day in the last one year has been an experience it itself. The idea of coming back to a room full of happy, concerned, honest and genuine people is an inexplicable feeling. Somewhere inside, it makes you feel good about yourself, because it’s people like these who make everyday life easy to live, and also the fact that, “acche logoen ke saath, accha accha hota hai” .