My stay in Gulbarga Part I

A week later, I was back in Gulbarga. The faithful Bargal which left Wadi Junction at 7:45 AM, chugged into Gulbarga an hour later and I walked down to Sharanabasaveshwara College of Science. It was - and I would like to believe it still is - one of the premier colleges in Gulbarga whose Principal at that time was a genial near bald gentleman S.M.Holi. Holi taught Chemistry. He was accessible and was very demonstrative in his devotion to Shree Sharanabasappa Appa - Appa in short, the spiritual leader of Lingayats in Gulbarga. Appa ran an educational empire in the northern part of Karnataka to which the HKE Society's PDA College of Engineering also belonged.
Having obtained an application form for admission to B.Sc, I filled it up and took up a B.Sc with Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics as subjects. The classes were to begin soon and though there were many who regularly travelled from Wadi to Gulbarga to attend college, I preferred to stay in a hostel. There were old friends from MCC like Ramarao, Ravi Rahalkar and others who also had obtained admission in the college So I was in good company.
Though SB College had a hostel, many from Wadi and Shahabad preferred a certain hostel called the Walchand Hirachand Lok Kalyan Trust Students'Hostel (WHLKTSHG), called Jain Hostel in short. It was administered by the management of the Company which manufactured the Premier Padmini Cars at Walchandnagar in Maharashtra and was locally run by one Mehta who was a an elderly Jain in Dhoti and white Gandhi cap. Jains were in abundance in northern Karnataka and southern Maharashtra and had names like Shah, Mehta etc. They as is known are strict vegetarians and Mehta was rather firm about discipline in the hostel. He held personal interviews of prospective students in the first room of the Hostel every six months to admit or reject them. The Hostel itself was located on the western side of the Railway line running from Madras to Bombay and was in the form of a square with a quadrangle in the centre. It had an excellent vegetarian mess run by a committee of students. The caretaker was one Lingappa and the cook was one Gowda who tuned up excellent north Karnataka fare. The food was excellent and wholesome to say the least and the ambience was serene. The lodgers were mostly rich Jains from Maharashtra and Karnataka, some Kannadigas who were students of the nearby PDA College and several students from Wadi and Gulbarga. I managed to secure an admission for six months at a fees of something like 300 Rupees for a six month period. The mess bill was expected to vary from 100 to 200 Rupees per month. It was thus that I settled down to a spell of 5 years of study at stay at SB College of Science and the Jain Hostel in the June of 1982.