27.E-hostel Common room and Kattangal incident

 Among the different students’ hostels in REC Calicut at that time,  E hostel was  the  farthest  from the administrative block with a small  compound wall separating the  hostel and campus from the Kattangal market. This was the hostel in which I was staying immediately after joining REC in Sept 1969 as resident warden. I became warden of this hostel also under the guidance of Dr.P.S.Srinivasan as Chief warden. The inmates of the E hostel were the senior most students just waiting for the final examination   and results so that they can get some job at the earliest and start a responsible life for themselves and the family which brought them up. Most of them were quite mature, but there were also a few mischief makers. 

Every hostel has a reading room called Common Room (CR) which is open only between 4 PM and 8 PM every day. There was no TV at that time, an old radio will be available from which someone will be hearing the cricket commentary or some Hindi songs all the time. A few magazines like TIME, Newsweek, Frontline , Illustrated Weekly and Film fare used to be made available. Newspapers coming in the morning will be deposited at the Steward’s room of the  hostel and this will not  reach the CR in the evening. The newspaperman, one Mr. Govindan, used to personally hand over the magazines to the person assigned to collect these. Otherwise, he is sure, he will not get the subscription money as these will disappear almost immediately. In spite of this, some magazines never reached the common room or disappeared almost within few minutes after reaching the place.

Among the members elected to the Hostel Committee, there was one elected as Common Room representative and he was responsible for the day to day affairs in the common room. A CR attender   used to be there to help him, usually a mess boy or a part time sweeper posted for a few extra bucks. 

When I became the Warden of the hostel, the contestants for the CR representative were two persons from Kollam, neighbors but always at loggerheads with each other. They were one G.Soman Pillai and Sunil Sen. None of us knew the reason for their quarrel. In the elections, Soman Pillai was the winner by the margin of a few votes. Sunil Sen started creating problems in the CR from the next day. Almost every day, he used to come to me with a written complaint stating that on this magazine  is lost or that one is lost. In the beginning, I took these seriously but later when it became a regular phenomenon, I had to ignore it as these were not genuine. Of course, some magazines were lost, but it was not easy to trace it or stop it as CR attender was also a useless guy.

During these days, suddenly Sunil Sen came up with a small group against ragging in the campus.  Only very few students were   involved in this, as majority knew ragging is a temporary phase and they were ready to leave it to the wardens to tackle in their own way. Moreover, ragging in most of the colleges were spearheaded by the second-year students and final year students were rarely interested in participating this social evil. But Sunil Sen was dead serious about this and started mobilizing support for his group from outside the campus with political groups and even convened a public meeting at Kattangal market against ragging. But the other students who were not happy for this wrong publicity for the  students started forming small groups against the anti-ragging group and several small fights ensued between these rival groups. But this quarrel took an ugly turn as some of the students under the influence of liquor started destroying some glass window panes of some hotels in Kattangal and this developed into a quarrel between REC students and the public. An open war ensued between the public and REC residents and some anti-social elements broke up the water pipe line feeding water from the   river to the REC campus through almost 3 KMs long pipelines at several places. Water supply to the campus where almost 2000 persons lived was disrupted. Even though the wells in the campus were urgently got cleaned, the water available was too meagre and was not good for drinking. College authorities tried to bring water in big containers with the help of district authorities. In spite of all these, the residents of the campus had a very difficult time like people marooned in a lonely island after a ship wreck. People wearing pants and shirts were scared to move out of the campus for fear of attack by the public for a few days.  The anti-social elements around had their heyday during these days. Anyway, after a few days, the panchayath authorities got involved in some compromise talks and some compensation was offered to the shop owners whose window panes were damaged, water lines repaired and water supply restored.

Tail piece:  It is understood that the two students mentioned in  this note met with tragic and untimely death a few years after leaving the college. One who joined IAF committed suicide and the other met with a watery death while swimming at Kovalam beach. (This is only hearsay, I could not confirm these)