Hostel life in India
Life in Indian boarding school
( Kurseong )
Today, I am going to share my own experiences and how I spent my time when I was in India on this blog. When talking about India, most people might think that it is a developing country, or some might think that it is bad and have negative thinking towards this country. It was not easy living in an Indian hostel, that is why I want to share my stories with you guys. The memories are still fresh in my mind.
Although I had both happiness and sorrow living in an Indian hostel, I gained a lot of experiences, learned many new things, and also met several people who have different nationalities and religions. Before going to India, I was just an ordinary girl who went to Thai school from kindergarten until seventh grade. After that, I moved to an Indian boarding school in order to complete the eighth and ninth grade.
I went on a trip with my cousin before I decided to go to study there; you may have heard that India is not a good place to live and study. At first, I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to go there to study as I only heard the negative stories about India. Many said that it’s an unsanitized country with mean people. But for me, everything was so different according to what the majority said and thought. I met several nice and kind people, a good environment, and good weather as my school is located on the mountain. I even get to see Mount Everest quite often from where I lived in the morning at Darjeeling. You guys might wonder what is Darjeeling and where is it; Darjeeling located in the Lesser Himalayas (2000 meters or 6700 ft), it is a city in the Indian state of West Bengal. However, Darjeeling is also known as Queen of the hills. Moreover, Darjeeling has its own famous product which is Darjeeling tea, while the toy train is one of UN heritage. There are various languages spoken in Darjeeling such as Bengali, Hindi, and Nepali (more than half of the population in Darjeeling speak Nepali ).
Staying in the dormitory is not bad but there are many rules that students have to follow otherwise they will get the punishment, but at times the rules they made are quite absurd and useless. Nevertheless, most of Indian schools are very strict when it comes to an education issue. Their main focus is to help the students get high marks in the exams; Indian schools think that an education is the most important thing, and they rarely encourage when students want to do the activities outside the classroom. Based on my experience, hostel students are less happy when compared to the day-scholar pupils as the school rules are too strict and force hostel students to do a lot of nonsense things. Living in a hostel with many rules and strict teachers made me feel a bit depressed and unhappy. I was not able to fully be myself when faced with all the rules they made, but luckily, I met a very great friends who always support me and have my back. Apart from friends, I also had my own Indian family as the guardian who took care of me. They made me feel like I have another family there.
The first day of the school hostel was exciting, chaotic, and a bit scary in my mind. It was a new society where people from many countries with different languages and cultures were staying together; the dormitory was 3 floors altogether with no fans or conditioners. The temperature will vary between 18–25 Celsius during the day time in summer which means that it’s going to get colder at night time and also during winter.
As a boarder, everything in the schedule is compulsory for us to follow; additionally, a day as a hostel student is such a long and tiring day for me. I have to wake up at 4 in the morning to do yoga and exercise with all the hostel students, it takes around 50 minutes. After the exercise, everyone needs to get back to their dormitory to get dressed for the morning study class. It usually starts at 7 and ends at 7:50 am, then we will have breakfast. If we talk about food, daily breakfast is boring as the school often provides us only bread and beans curry almost every morning. One of the funniest things for me is that I really hate beans while my school provides beans for almost every meal. After breakfast, I would go straight to my class, it begins at 8:20; there were 8 classes, 45 minutes each period with two break times. The school ends around 2:45. Unfortunately, I still got an hour of tuition after classes which I usually skipped most of the time because I felt exhausted after a long day. At 3:40 pm, I would take a 30 minutes break to change from the school uniform to PE uniform because the hostel students will have an evening exercise and evening study class accordingly.
Usually, Thai schools have classes only Monday to Friday but most of the schools in India would remain closed only on Sundays since Saturdays were a half-day. All the boarders will allow using their phones to call their parents on Saturday and Sunday only. The popular activities for hostel students during the weekend are to visit the local market in the town, but students have to ask for permission from the warden first. There were a variety of things, local people would come to the market and sell vegetables, fruits, and foods. Moreover, there are many bakery and cosmetic shops. I usually walk around to see what people are doing. Not only visiting the local market but we also go for a walk on Sunday; I was walking from the school to the park which is around 5 to 6 kilometers with a sloping road, and I have to use the leaf plate and my own hand to eat lunch.
It was tough being a student in India, but I have never regretted my decision. I get to know a lot of people and the majority of them are close to me, I had a chance to do the things that I have never done before. It was tiring yet a fun memory. If you ,the readers, are still hesitant whether India is good or not; I would suggest you visit there once.
