Mind-room : 309/E

Recently on a holiday, I realized how much I missed my hostel room back in REC. It was room 309 in E-Hostel building. Got this room by chance. Rooms were allotted by a lot system - you were given a unique number, a lot was drawn and if your number came up; you picked your room. Back then I was aiming for the room 108, as I had managed to hold onto that number during the last 2 years. Luck would have it otherwise, my number was drawn a little too late and didn't have much choice. 309/E was a friend's room, familiar and well maintained by him. So I shrugged and moved into the room.

It was a small room, about 8' x7' with pink (YUCK!) whitewashed walls. I was told that the previous fucker had got the wall specially done a year ago. If you chipped the pink whitewash, a much worse colour came through - pistachio green whitewash (Double YUCK!). You got a cot, table & chair, a built-in cupboard, ceiling fan, a window in the east wall and a door in the west wall. Floor was old school red-oxide floor, pitted like the face of the moon. In-fact some craters had to be filled up DIY style with candle wax. Sounds like a goblin's cave.

The pink walls drove me nuts for a week until I figured out an elegant solution - one normal 60W tungsten bulb and one kaandhani table lamp donated by Srikanth. The yellow light made the room peachy in the evenings. Got a nice standard issue grass mat (not the plastic kind). Had a small booze party for house warming and she was ready. Most people complained the room made them drowsy, blamed it on the lighting, mattress or me. A year later the hostel authorities whitewashed it a bluish-white. The room was like a battery charger, I was the battery and I loved the space.

On a mental level the first 2 years at REC saw me going nuts on various levels. Now this space was the mana I needed to further space out. Many of the doodles on moongallery were done in the wee hours by that table lamp. Many a cassette tapes - where worn out on the h-fi. The first song played in that room was a jazz number called The A-Train (Duke Ellington) from a Verve compilation. The last was probably Dio's Rock n' Roll Children.

The most ambitious project taken up in the room was an installation piece. I noticed that when I switched off the lights the graphic equalizer on my hi-fi attracted fireflies. These buggers used to pop in every night and give me a good show. Later on I noticed that the spiders on the top corners of my room were having a field day, wrapping up the unfortunate fireflies that got stuck to their webworks. These guys would last about 3 days, before the died. So I stopped cleaning/destroying the webs out let the webbing grow naturally. Only problem being that I could not switch on the fan as it would destroy the delicate network of web. Soon I had a false ceiling of black web. It was black because I had the habit of lighting up 2 of my fav sandalwood incense sticks daily. So every night for 3 months I had a light show and the spiders had nice chow. I wonder if they ate them or just were light phobic. If I charged those spiders rent, I would've been a millionaire! The whole piece came crashing down on September 11th along with the Twin towers in USA (yes its very symbolic). Some fool popped into the room one afternoon, exclaimed it was hot, switched on the fan and told me I ought to clean the cobwebs!! The Bastard, the roof of my world collapsed. No more astral displays. In another months time my hi-fi set conked out and I was reduced to a trusty 2-in-1 with no fancy graphic equalizer.