It was (and I hope it surely is) the tiniest and craziest of all the halls I have ever had the chance to visit in KGP. With a meagre capacity of hardly 150 students, Gokhale stands in sharp contrast to the giant 2100-acre campus, openly challenging its sense of superiority. It’s so small that you won’t notice it even if you walk past it every day! Even many of our seniors hadn’t the slightest clue if there existed something called ‘Gokhale’ in KGP. But anybody who came across it, anybody who, for the first time, was revealed the skeletons in the closet of Gokhale, would be deeply interested in anything about it, anything at all! For Gokhale had a secret, a secret which explained the fact why everybody looked at it with a rather fatherly expression on his face, as though watching the frolics of a 6-months-old child.
‘All freshers? Really? Are you sure? But, how can…?’ I got so tired of this usual rubbish by the end of my first year that I seriously considered roaming around with a ‘Gokhale is an all-freshers hall’ badge on my chest. At first, it looked quite foolish to me for the seniors who had such a hard time believing it. ‘I mean.., yeah, it’s weird, a bit unusual.., surely.., but still, it’s not ‘KGP without “Technology”’, is it?’ But soon it became clear to me that there was nothing wrong with the idea itself. The actual trouble was that our dear seniors couldn’t imagine even in their wildest dreams how a good-for-giggle gullible fresher could possibly make a politically stable and matured Happa.
I distinctly remember my first encounter with hall politics. It was around 10 o’clock in the evening and many of us were playing badminton in the open court of our hall when a parade of around fifteen people approached us. They looked so formal, bearing such a grave expression on their faces, I wondered whether the senate had revoked Gokhale’s official status of ‘Hall of Residence’, not unlike the way Pluto had been deprived of its status as a ‘planet’ a few years back. But then I recognized some faces and one of them actually smiled at me, and I was quite relieved to be convinced that nothing of the sort had happened. We were told to call all our friends in the badminton court for an “important meeting”. The meeting started soon after it was clear that nobody else was going to come. One of the guys from the procession stood up and told us that they were there to acquaint us with the various posts in the hall elections and were going to present their candidatures for the same. I looked at the band that stood before us, huddled together, appearing seamlessly united. And a childish thought occurred to me. ‘So.., would there be just.., just one party contesting these…, what should I say…, yeah, Hall Elections?’. I was halfway asking them ‘Where is the opposition?’ when they started giving their speeches. I suspended my question for the time being for it would have been rude to interrupt. And soon I was quite glad for it, for it later became clear that the party which stood before us was in fact not a ‘party’ at all. There were many instances of multiple candidates contesting for the same post and I wondered how all these contestants had come together under the same roof for this ‘important meeting’.
The day of the elections finally knocked on our door. Looking at our options, Julius Nyerere’s remark on democracy flashed in my head “The United States is also a one-party state but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” Nevertheless, we voted for the best. All in all the elections went quite uneventful except for a little problem which cropped up soon after the elections were over. There were many posts in the council for which nobody had contested. ‘Now what? Would these posts remain empty throughout the year?’ Our warden took a glance at the sad faces of our defeated candidates and came up with a solution even Einstein would have admired. He matrix-matched the rejected posts of the council with the defeated candidates of the election and thus came into existence the glorious Hall Council of Gokhale.
One may argue that the Happa is the most powerful and important member of the whole Hall Council, but actually, it was the work of GSec Mess that the people in Gokhale were really looking forward to. There must have been a great pressure of expectations over our dear friend at that time for everyone was desperately waiting for the new mess menu to be started hoping that it would completely revolutionise the current food quality. The much-awaited moment came, but it felt like nothing had changed. People waited and waited. Surely, by the end of the week, they would realise the change, the revolution in the taste of the hitherto awful food. But that moment didn’t come at all. The appearance of the food had surely changed, but the taste, it remained as deadly as ever. The GSec Mess was solely held responsible for all this and was widely condemned for letting us down so badly. Rumours began to circulate about the GSec mess not eating in the mess himself. Soon, people were arguing about how a person who had not tasted the oh-so-glorious mess food himself could possibly have any idea of the plight that all of us were suffering from so terribly. How could he have any empathy for our misery when he hadn’t faced it himself? People went quite mutinous over the subject and the hall council hurried to find a solution to this problem. Finally, another person was given the responsibility of deciding the mess menu. Whether he was appointed as Secy or GSec, I couldn’t find even by the end of my first year, for our previous GSec (my apologies to him if he was GSec till the end, I dunno) could still be seen fulfilling some of the duties of his post.
Gokhale was always buzzing. First year meant no worries, no fear of anything and add the absence of seniors, we had no reason to restrict ourselves anywhere. This was something that I liked most about Gokhale. It felt alive, all the time. But there were the exceptions of bi-semester solar eclipses which took over KGP twice a semester snuffing out all the lamps of pleasure and peace leaving nothing but sheer darkness of panic everywhere. Even Gokhale fell prey to the darkness so pitch black. But the other side of it was full of sunshine. The moment the exams were over, there was euphoria, the most popular way of expressing which among us was through a good old water fight.
We had our own way of doing, rather complicating things. Nothing could be simple and straightforward for us, not even Diwali preparations. The day before Diwali, our GSec Socult texted our official group that the work of Rangoli is still incomplete, and if we do not volunteer now, Gokhale’s Rangoli will never see the light of day. Successfully emotionally blackmailed by this message, many of us decided to valiantly forgo sleep, and wholeheartedly dedicate our night for the sake of Gokhale’s reputation. With Rangoli Gold firmly set in mind, perfectly determined to work till the finish line, we set out to work with the confidence rare even for a champion. But fate had different plans, we ran out of colours in the middle of the night! Managing to complete the Rangoli the next morning is another thing but this little tragedy gave me a sufficient reality check about how futile my life really is.
If there was anything every fresher had been desperately waiting for, it was the General Championship. There was a different hype for it in the first years. Whether it was because of the constant rants they had to hear from the freshers from other halls regarding the probability of Gokhale winning a medal in the GC being less than that of India winning a medal in ice hockey or whether it was just their sheer dedication towards Gokhale I don’t know, but our hall council seemed to be highly motivated for GC preparations. You could participate in any of the Tech and Socult GC events and you would literally receive a treat for it. They were requesting every single person to participate in some or the other event. Sports GC was a different scenario of course. There you actually needed real talent. I once came across Gokahle’s squash match in GC. I was baffled to see our players. Not a single one of them had played squash earlier! So I sat down to work out the pattern using an extremely complicated ML algorithm. However, once I adjusted the regularisation term and addressed the multicollinearity in the regression of the data, the ridge equation essentially revealed to me that all the guys who were playing squash for Gokhale were NSO Badminton players.
A little more fun, and after much good-hearted banter, our time at Gokhale finally came to an end. It was a very complex emotion that I felt while leaving Gokhale. I was excited to get back home, but sad at the same time for missing the fun I had had there in a year. I couldn’t stop, I had to go, and I knew that I would not be living in Gokhale anymore. So I took one last glance at it, bade goodbye to it, and moved on, taking away all the memories I had made while in Gokhale with me.