More Gulbarga

There definitely was a Marathi group and a Kannada group in Jain Hostel. Then there were the “secular people” from Shahabad and Wadi, who were neither this nor that. Some from Shahabad were definitely of the “Marathi group”, but others were "secular". We used to get a newspaper in the Hostel, which some seniors would read. The Kannada group wanted The Hindu and the Marathi group wanted The Times of India. That is how, long ago in the unknown hinterlands of India, I first learnt that newspapers had linguistic, religious and caste affiliation. Till then I thought newspapers gave us news. I gave up reading newspapers altogether then. Televisions were not yet around. I bought The Week, a news magazine for 2 Rupees per issue. I also bought the Science Reporter. These cost me about 12 Rupees a month but gave me what the newspapers could not. Analysis and in depth reportage rather than knee jerk reports of what just occurred. I was not to know then, that the Editors of both The Week, Mr. Prasannan Radhakrishnan and K.S.Sachidananda Murthy and the Editor of Science Reporter, Hasan Jawaid Khan Sahab will all become my friends later in life.  Perhaps this period made me inured to the charms of television, which is an even more half baked medium,  in later years.

Damodar Dattatreya Lele was a  Marathi leader in Jain hostel. He was in the final year of engineering at the HKE(Hyderabad Karnatak Education)Society’s Engineering College, now called the Poojya Doddappa Appa College of Engineering. Lele was considered rather a genius of the first order. He was short, stocky and fair, wore a white loose pyjama and a half sleeved vest at all times when he was in the hostel. He seemed more interested in ideologies than in mechanical engineering, but marks seemed to come easily to him. One September morning in 1982, he came around to every room with a steel container (called dabba in India). With a steel spoon he frugally measured out half a spoonful of sugar and gave it to us all, in the manner of a poojari (priest) distributing Prasad and said, “Sheikh Abdullah mar gaya. Moonh meetha karo”. Not many knew who Sheikh Abdullah was, but I, the reader of The Week did, though I did not know why we should eat sugar if he died. We used to offer what is called a shraadhh for my grandfather at home, on the anniversary of his – my grandfather’s I mean -  death, and made sweets to be offered to Brahmins on those occasions. Perhaps Sheikh Abdullah is a kind of grandfather to Lele - I thought.

Lele also was very supremely but subtly arrogant and superior, though he smiled condescendingly as he deigned to explain certain things to us – though never mechanical engineering. His hair was always cut short – about half an inch in length. Formally it was he who ragged us and his ragging was as subtle and insipid as his other activities. It was always whispered by his acolytes, one of whom was my classmate from MCC, Shahabad, Ravi Rahalkar, who fashioned himself after Lele by close cropping his hair, that Lele would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Lele treated Rahalkar like a retarded younger cousin. Now Rahalkar’s father worked for AVB (ACC Vickers Babcock Ltd. which was now called ABL after the departure of Vickers in Shahabad. He was rather high in the hierarchy – compared to Lele’s father.  What Lele was to the Marathis of Jain Hostel, Mr. Rahalkar was to the Marathis of ABL colony.  While Lele’s father was subordinated to Mr. Rahalkar in Shahabad, 30 kms upstream, Ravi Rahalkar was made to realise that he was far far inferior to Damodar Dattatreya Lele.

And then there were those who were neither this nor those. I was room mate to one Pradeep Oak for six months. This was another curious feature in Jain Hostel. Your room mate was changed every six months, lest you develop nefarious attachments. We were also required to quit bag and baggage every six months and seek - literally SEEK re admission in June and January, by giving an interview along with ones fathers, to Mehta about whom I had talked earlier. The kids stood still while the fathers of those who did not know Marathi (my father did not) grovelled. Mehta qualified as a Marathi in the above scheme of things, and unlike proper Marathi Brahmins or Jains, Iyers were plain plant eating animals without any ideology and hence admitted as a matter of grace. It was thus that I got put in with Pradeep Oak once. Oak was a Marathi anchored in Hubli in Karnataka (one who later went on to become the brother in law of the famed Ananth Kumar of the BJP). Funnily Oak also dressed like Lele. White Pyjamas and half sleeved white banians. All of these talked of Hinduism being not a religion but a “way of life”. It was long after that I learnt that these men were affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh of Nagpur. My arrival at this city in 2015 May, solved a lot of mysteries that have been lingering in my mind since 1980 – but then opened up new mysteries as to why Lord Buddha was the enemy of Lord Ganesha. I am learning.

And then there were those peculiar characters – Sunil Jhanwar from Jalgaon, Some Chawda from Navsari, another Mehta from Akola (a thin short guy who was immensely rich and worshipped Saint Gajanan Maharaj and who often in Marlon Brando style fun looked at the server in the hoster saying, "Mere dahi me fase? Ah fase?" something about which I do not know even today, a joker called Sanjay Biyani from Pune, a fat guy whose name I do not remember from Solapur who did his D. Pharm, then B.Pharm and then M.Pharm with a fanatical devotion of one who had committed a murder in Solapur and was hiding in Jain Hostel as a student of pharmaceuticals till the heat cooled off. Only sadly, the heat didn’t perhaps cool off, for he went on to register for an M.Phil in Pharmacology. It was from him that I first learnt the word “pharmacognosy” though God alone knows what it means.  Will continue in the next post.