By There is a place in the capital of India where even the Sun God is scared to shower its rays – it is called ‘Dingy’ corridor of the Lady Shri Ram (LSR) College. The hostel or rather the ‘Residence Hall’ of LSR is a rectangle shaped structure with rooms in all four sides and a lawn in the middle. Each corridor of this structure is given a name – mine was named Dingy. In general, colleges in Delhi have co-inhabitants as dogs but LSR was different; its co-inhabitants were cats.
Dingy corridor contains all kinds of residents- the sleepy ones; the nerdy ones, the sporty ones, the dreamy ones, the absent ones etc etc. Life in this corridor slowly begins at 8:30 am in the morning where sleeping beauties gradually wake up and walk upto the dining hall. The first thing they do is have mood swings seeing the spread of breakfast. They might never even have lighted a match in their own homes; but here they boast of their good old days. Anyhow, they sleepily accept their fate and the menu, grab a slice of bread and break free of its edges and gulp it down with coffee. Just like the sides of the bread, the warning of the mess bhayajis (brothers) not to waste the food, goes into the bin.
During the day, there is a blanket of silence in the dingy corridor as the residents are usually in the college premises on weekdays and during the weekends, need to fulfil their quota of beauty sleep. In the evenings, the dingy is buzzing with the gossip of the day and preparation for hostel meetings and dinner and more importantly for the purchases to be made from the tuck-shop for the ‘late night study sessions’
Late at night you will find both two-legged animals (ladies of course!) and four-legged animals (cats) floating around from room to room in the corridors with no aim in mind. At times, four legged reptiles, 6-legged and 8-legged arthropods can also be seen lurking around. When the two-legged animals meet the multiple-legged anthropods, the exchange is usually marked with a sharp shriek.
The residents of dingy are usually the last to go to bed, the last to wake up, the last to go to class. However, they are extremely beautiful, stylish and intelligent. At the end of my stay at the residence hall, I had received the award for the ‘Resident for exemplary conduct’, but perhaps an equivalent achievement is that I am a proud ‘Dingite’.
NOTE: Father wrote me letters every weekend when I was away at hostel – in one such letter my descriptions of the first year at hostel were summarized on paper by him and this article is an inspiration from that.
