Of Sharp C's and Missing Keys

I returned one afternoon from a Mathematics class to find the room in chaos. Not the kind of chaos you usually expect, though. In fact, an outsider would have considered an orderly, clean and habitable room as completely normal. But as far as deviation from the usual goes, the room was in chaos.

As it were, I was in no mood to tolerate abnormality after an hour and a half of being told why exactly my math teacher was the sole load bearing pillar of the college. The lecture had been frighteningly close to finding its way into a medical kit for insomniacs, and nodding off to sleep so many times had twisted my neck into some sort of complex, semi-quadrangular, obtuse shape. Pretty safe to assume my perspective would be skewed that afternoon, which the guys soon found out…

“What?”

“Speaker plug”

“WHAT?”

“The plug was loose… I think it fell under the bed somewhere”

That, of course, meant that there was a fight in the room, the speaker took the fall for it, and someone threw the plug under the bed in anger. So the unthinkable had happened, the music had stopped, and thus indifference had

died, the two warring dudes were placated, and the room was thoroughly cleaned to find the missing plug.

“Please tell me you found it!”

“Relaaaax… we did”

I breathed. If anything could make these lazy bums work, it was their beloved music. The times I had searched all alone for my missing key, had screamed, begged, bossed and fought them into cleaning… and all it took was a missing plug. It does wonders for self-worth.

But that said, Music and speakers are perhaps the single most important thing in a hostelite’s life. So many hours are wasted wondering if a syllable is pronounced ‘sa’ or ‘sha’, if the song was appropriate, if the hero deserved it, and what not. For all practical purposes, we are, for that short time, the experts of all we hear, with a thousand cameras trained on us for the next pearl of wisdom to drop. It elevates us from the morbid walls and the smelly toilets, like a whisky would to a homeless man. The smallest variation, the slightest errors, are dissected and ruthlessly dismissed. Horizons are expanded, new genres explored, and each compared to our very own desi music, the result predictable but soothing to the heart none the less.

There are, of course, a few negatives. Some of the less talented of us force our own, slightly less conventional voice on the rest, Siva being a regular offender. Some others are so caught up in the ‘moment’ that we exercise our poetic licence on the poet. The most atrocious and shameless of the lot, however, tend to leave the song alone, but attack the ending credits, the lead singers being the most affected. And with great unhappiness must I admit, that in this last category the writer does fall. The pit is deep indeed, but worse than staying on a plain, plane terrain for life.