Durgapur had some very good schools but unlike a city, did not have any college for undergraduate studies except for one Government college. Inevitably, we had to go away for higher studies. This meant that for the next 5 years or so, we had to live in a hostel out of a suitcase, away from the comforts of home.
I am going to talk about the experience of kids living in a hostel outside their home towns. More often than not, these hostels were part of the university or college where you went to study.
Sometimes parents would accompany their children to ensconce them in the hostel; sometimes not. My parents did not accompany me to any of the hostels where I stayed after leaving home. Hostel life accelerated my transition from semi childhood to proper adulthood. It was the boost that made me self-reliant and confident, almost overnight.
Some of my student years where spent living in A. N. Jha Hostel of Allahabad University. It was known as the Muir hostel prior to its rechristening. And even after its name change, the inmates of this hostel were called Muirians.
Muir hostel had an impressive history. A large number of Muirians had made it big in the Indian bureaucracy and many more in the corporate sector. The list is endless. At the cost of sounding a bit pompous - the first and second Indian Chairmen of ITC Ltd. were Murians!!
Though I left home in 1972, my stint at Muir hostel began in 1978. In between I was at D A V College, Kanpur and Meerut university and had also had a brief stint at IIT-Delhi.
Communication technology was primitive by today’s standards. Let me give you a flavour.
Instead of emails, we sent postcards, inland letters, envelopes and in case of urgency, a telegram.
A telegram could be either ordinary or urgent or even greetings. A normal telegram would be an official looking folded communication while a greetings telegram was a flowery envelope that looked cheerful. Greetings telegrams were sent for occasions like festivals, new arrivals, good tidings etc. You could send a telegram by dialling the operator from your phone who would type your message straight on a teleprinter that had wired connectivity across the country.
Telephonic conversation meant using a rotary dial telephone that A. G. Bells had invented. It was grounded in one location and was used to make local, outstation and international calls.
Local calls could be made by dialling local numbers. These could be found in the directory that had all the numbers alphabetically arranged. For large cities, a directory could be thousands of pages long.
For outstation calls, or trunk calls as these were known as, one had to go through the operator who was an employee of the Post & Telegraph Department and could be reached by dialling ‘180’ on the landline phone for ordinary trunk calls.
Trunk calls had three variants: Ordinary, Urgent and Lightening.
While we dialled 180 for ordinary calls to reach its operator, one had to dial 199 for urgent and/or lightening calls. And here is the thing: an ordinary trunk call could take about 3 hours to connect; an urgent trunk call about 1 hour and a lightening trunk call could be connected in about half an hour. To make sure that you had the desired person at the other end, you could also make this a ‘PP call’. ‘PP’ stood for Particular Person!! In case your desired person was not available, the operator would continue to call this number periodically till they found the PP. And all this while, you waited near your phone.
For the uninitiated, let me give you an idea of the costs involved. If an ordinary call cost X, an urgent call cost 2X and a lightening call cost 4X. If you add a PP to this, that was 50% more.
All in all, making trunk calls was serious business. It cost money and time and therefore you made trunk calls only when you had both, and in plenty.
And then there was the ‘money order’. Bank transfer of funds was unheard of.
When you needed money from home, you dropped a post card asking for the same and the money would come to you by money order. A postman would come to you in person and give you the money physically. I stayed in a hostel and he would either time himself so that he found me there or would leave a note on my door asking me to come to the post office to collect my money.
For GenZ or even GenY, it will be difficult to imagine life without mobile phones, laptops, internet connectivity et al.
When I left home at the age of 17 to stay in a hostel, parental guidance and support was limited to the time I visited home on holidays. The rest of the time one had to rely on one’s wits and support from friends who studied with you or stayed in the same hostel.
Allahabad University was a great place to live and to study. The camaraderie amongst hostel mates was of a pretty high order. Seniors would pass on their notes to their juniors. Fellow inmates would lend you money if you run short, especially for paying your hostel or university dues. We looked after each other in times of need, especially sickness.
With no distractions like the television, internet, and the like, all the time was either spent in studying together, or playing together or indulging in common hobbies – games, music, mimicry, acting etc.
Staying on my own made me pretty self-reliant. Networking with my juniors, peers and seniors gave me confidence in myself. It made my outward looking. It gave me an opportunity to appreciate diversity of cultures because my mates came from all across the country.
Even today I am in touch with some of my mates from those years and can seek help or advise without hesitation. Staying together and weathering many a storm created a bond that only close knit families have.
So why am I telling you all this?
I feel that today while we have cutting edge technology to make life easier for us, it is also making us inward looking and lonely. We hesitate to communicate with each other, relying on ‘Google’ to give us the answers. We hesitate to seek help. We hesitate to reach out. Somewhere we have grown a misplaced sense of ego that prevents us from connecting with another person specially when we need to.
We order food online, we book travel tickets online, we buy clothes online, we book hotel rooms online, we book cabs online, etc. etc. Parents communicate with children on mobile texting and vice versa!!
Relationships have become transactional, bereft of the emotional connect that makes us human. I'm told it's rude to just pick up the phone & call someone & that I should drop them a message instead - which is utterly ludicrous to me.
Life in a hostel was incredible fun & I will come back with some experiences of my life there, to demonstrate how we learnt the art of living in complete absence of all the technology that makes life "convenient" today.
And mind you - each one of us did well - professionally, personally, socially.
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