You’ve achieved something huge. You’re just a couple of days away from living your dreams, going to med school. Those early morning physics practice sessions have paid off. Your family is proud and all your loved ones are elated. You’re happy too. But the tingling sensation deep down in the pit of your stomach refuses to go away, doesn’t it?
Change does that to a person.
Change is always associated with fear, risk and doubt. Nobody likes uncertainty. I mean, who would want to leave the comfort of their home and start sharing a room with a total stranger? You have to clean up after yourself. Lose something, mom can’t search it for you. You have a billion questions on your mind now. Let’s drive away all your apprehensions.
You’d be drowned in a sea of new faces, faces that would be there in your Facebook profile picture soon, faces which would be etched permanently in your heart. Nobody would understand why you got that particular nickname in school, nobody would be able to relate to your memories from home. But in no time you’d be making so many new memories that you might need to insert an SD card into your brain to store those treasures.
You probably never shared a room with anyone before, leave alone with a person from an entirely different part of the country/world. This is when you learn to adjust to another persons needs, when someone becomes family in very less time. You’d see your roomie yawning and offer to switch the lights off. Within a month, you’d start playing music in the middle of the night and randomly start dancing in the corridors. Your roomie could be that person who’d be sipping iced tea with you on a lazy Sunday afternoon thirty years later.
When you think of the word ‘hostel’, an old building with dark corridors and broken beds comes to your mind. Think again, this is Bejai. Awesome building, spacious corridors and furniture straight out of a magazine. With a few family photographs and your favourite posters on the wall, it instantly feels like home.
Bejai is like a beautiful private island. College, mess, hostel, library and a temple, all in one compound. Craving for something other than the mess food? There’s a canteen. Need a spiritual moment? Lord Ganesha sits right beside the anatomy dissection hall. Feel like playing in the rain? The basketball court is all yours. Need awesome WiFi? There’s the library, or you could study there. Tired of staring at fat books? Head to the anatomy museum! Whatever you need, Bejai doesn’t disappoint.
Socialisation mainly happens in the mess. Join as many tables as you like to accommodate your huge group of friends. Or sit on a small table for some quality boy-girl time. It’s a common mess! Be prepared for the occasional food fights, train vigorously. When there’s a power cut, scream your lungs out. That’s a tradition you’ve got to uphold! (Notice how there’s no mention of food?)
You can’t possibly get bored. If you’re not in the TV room watching your favourite show, you’re taking a long walk around the campus. The reading room is an absolute paradise for book lovers. Biochemistry or mystery – pick up whatever you’d like to read. You could reserve your evenings for badminton or basketball. Or you could just innocently walk into the lovers lane, being the curious cat that you are! When you go home for Christmas, you’ll be hostel-sick. You’ll miss the coconut tree standing right outside your window, you’ll miss the Maggi+Movie nights, you’ll miss the smiles of the helpful Akkas, you’ll miss your new family. You’ll even miss the mess!
Bejai is the long pleasurable retreat after all that bio, physics and chemistry. It’s a perfect beginning to the awesome college life you’re gonna have. This is not just a chapter of your life, it’s a whole new saga.
Welcome home, junior!
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