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My Days in Loho

LOHO stands for Loyola hostel. To be a complete slave of Loyola you should live in the hostel. If the college was a sub jail then Loho was a central prison.

My Loho experience was a mixture of both freedom and restrictions. Being PG students me and my friends never was taken too seriously. We were a minority who enjoyed a certain amount of special rights.

This blog is about my life in LOHO. It is exactly ten years now. I joined the hostel in 1998 and left it in 2000. To get academic admission in Loyola College is much easier when compared to act of entering the hostel. Dad tried his best bringing out all known methods of persuasion to get me a room in the hostel. Even today he talks with an adventurous spirit about this Loho admission episode. I had to stay outside in a hotel till I got my Loho berth. If I remember correctly the name of the hotel was – Vishram. It was located near the central station in wall tax road. So every day I ate from hotel, traveled by suburban train and saw the city a lot. If I am to narrate my outside Loho experiences then I will have to add a sub blog to this main blog.

With Dad’s help I finally kept my feet inside a Loho room. My room number was 417 which was in the 14^th block which was near the railway line. Initial days were spend setting up the room. Frequent visits to Choolaimedu (Choolz) were made. Dad went back leaving me to explore the world known as Loho. Dad had introduced me to some ‘mallu’ students and advised me to stick with them. Most of them were seniors. Some were priests. There was nothing exciting about these ‘mallu’ friends. They were highly biased and they thought that the ‘other’ (locals) were nothing but a bunch of ‘cinema crazy buffoons’. I had two other friends – Pallavan and Sankar. Pallavan was my classmate and Sankar was his Be.d mate. I found these two quite different from what I had heard from the ‘mallu’ circle. This and many other reasons made me quit the M Circle who were growing self-centered and quarrelsome day by day. One more friend who joined our gang was Sundar. We four – (Pallavan, Sankar, Prem, and Sundar) were always found together. We also had two visiting members – Sundaramoorthy and Br Rufus. Both were always busy or at least they feigned that they were. Anyway it was a joy to have them with us especially Br Rufus who was also an assistant warden and member of the Jesuit community who ran Loyola. When he was round we used to enjoy special rights in the mess like getting hot Dosas and some extra eggs like that. He was quite popular in the campus as he was in charge of the choir and campus ministry service. it was true that I was little jealous at Br Rufus SJ.

back to gayl-ash-shibool

after 45 days of resident experience I am back in sohar. looking forward to an interesting academic year.