the charisma of thoughts..

"Home is where the heart is.", they say. Well, not so much. For us hostelers, the heart always stays with the family. Sadly, you stay at a home away from home. So you will have to make do with it. Nonetheless, your hostel room is the place where you spend, pretty much the whole year and although you are not really meant to entertain ‘guests’  while at it, you sure have to fight those damned stinking odours of day to day life. You might overlook them but they wouldn’t; THEY who pass by for a book, a movie or just for some evening gupshup. And the things they tell you!! 
“Dude, at least clean up your room once a semester”; 
“I see this same bed sheet every time I visit and it sucks”. “I have two of the same”- I tell them
“When did you last take a bath?”- “The previous Holi”- is what a sarcastic version of me can come up with.





Although, we hostelers are meant to be carefree freaks, my friends and acquaintances are what you may call “Decent boys” and if in some unfortunate hour, you enter the room of some guy in the A-Block (by some mysterious play of chance, only resourceful guys live there- the A class people), they wouldn’t miss a chance to brag about how ‘maintained’ they keep their rooms. You may not really feel bad about it but you sure don’t want to listen to their ‘Grahashobha advice’. So you decide. That for once, you will get rid of all this nitpicking; that you will turn your room from #SmellytoSmiley and put a smile on their faces when they enter.

It’s not all that rocket science to know where to start. For once, ‘they’ have made one thing easy for you- They have pointed out the things that reek of smells which you find evanescent but are everlasting to them. To begin with, the bed sheet. Yes, you really have a pair of the same type but the current one actually has been on the bed for…well..far too long J. So you replace it with that third one which you had initially packed to be used as a cover. Also, disguised as one of those ‘decent boys’, you make sure to send the dirty one with the laundry guy the next time he comes. Next comes that water bucket with the overpending stash of dirty laundry. Sadly enough, you can’t toss it someplace like at home to get rid of the smell which is a big challenge. So the best thing to do is to wash them but what you can do is, and this one is self-invented, to first put a big polybag over the clothes and then cover them with a cardboard piece or some similar item. 

The next spice in this stinking curry of a room is the kettle. It may happen at times that you feel the urge to have that midnight Maggi delight, eggs, or a brewing cup of tea. Obviously, you don’t clean the utensils then and the layer of the aftereffects, accompanied with a deadly whiff, will live to see another day, courtesy of your laziness, until you need to prepare something else. Once again, there is an easy way and a hard way to this. You may go for cleaning them or you can just put soap water in them and keep them on the window shed J. Hehehe..heights of indolence.




Finally, if it is not too much then a quick use of the broom on the floor would suffice for the cleaning part. If you are really in the mood, you could wipe the floor too. Now, to create a pleasant, redolent atmosphere in the room, the first thing you need before any odour agent is a cross breeze which you can create my letting open the door and the windows for some considerable amount of time.

Lastly, I can’t really tell about you but, if you do have a sister who is adroit with the ways that make a house look like home, you can call her for some advice. I did. And much to my dismay, she seemed so interested that she provided me with the exact price, the particular essence and even the quantity of Ambi pur Air effects. +1 to you if you guessed it right because I straightaway bought it.



So while it finally turns that some household advice did the trick for you, you can’t but argue that ‘they’ are finally delighted, surprised and some even shocked to come into your room and find it so idyllic and serene. After days, they join you for that group project at your room which later turns out to be a group Maggi one. You look at them and think about the standards you need to maintain for this moment. Will you do all this all over again? Maybe Yeah…for friends. But if they really are friends, then Nahh.