Chronicles of a Lounge Undone

They say all good things come to an end. This one never even fully began. Sigh..

We had wanted to make a lounge between the B and C blocks in our hostel for a long time now. By the end of the summer, I was so excited by it that I even started posting on Facebook that we're going to make the BC Lounge as soon as college starts. For the first 2 weeks after we were back, the only thing on our minds was the lounge. I never saw so much single-minded dedication in such a large group of people. We even had a shared googledoc by the name BC Lounge for keeping track of expenses.

We decided that it was going to be a happy lounge. It was going to be bright and colorful and a place where we could sit and drink coffee while it rains or enjoy the sunshine with a nice book. Some hard-core filter coffee fan (read tam (read DJ)) even suggested a coffee vending machine. It was going to be made from scratch, including the "table". Several trips were made to Jayanagar and hardware stores to get curtains and bedspreads and cushions and what-not. We decided it was going to have transparent blinds which serve the dual purpose of keeping the rain away and making it bright during the day. We used to imagine how awesome it would look with the raindrops on the transparent sheets in the night lights. We were going to have a grand inaugural party with everyone we knew and lotsa cheese-burst pizza (and filter coffee)...

Of course there were pitfalls and idiosyncrasies and idiocies. We couldn't get transparent sheets so we had bought transparent table cloths to stitch them together to make the blinds. We found one friendly tailor who had a lot to talk, could not tell that 6 feet is 72 inches, made it very clear that he thought our idea was ridiculous but nonetheless had a somewhat endearing demeanor and took up the challenge with such determination it re-instilled my faith in the inherent goodness of human nature. He later made a couple of distress calls frantically saying it was impossible to stitch them together to make such a large blind. DD was understanding and suave and persuasive and convinced him to make one anyway. But he was adamant about not stitching the other one. We decided that that window would be left open for the breeze.

We needed curtain rods to hang the blinds. They had to be 12 feet long. We did not think about how to carry them to the campus until after we bought them and were about to hail an auto. I-ball was bold enough to talk to the auto guy, hold the 12-feet curtain rods vertically on the side of the auto, ignore intrusive glances from everyone on the road, not give in to the pain when the rods hit the high branches of the trees by the road (and sent a shower of falling leaves behind us) and all the time converse in the most natural fashion while I tried slinking into one corner of the auto and disappear and cursed the one who came up with the idea of the lounge. Once back on campus, we did not have to take the stairs to carry them upstairs - one of us just went up and took the standing rods from below.

One day, after some serious GD about the lounge, I said something on the lines of "Yayy the BC lounge is going to be ready soon!" which drew a lot of scandalized glares and someone shouted, "For GOD's sake, will you PLEASE stop calling it the BC lounge?!?" It was then that it dawned on us that it was high time we give a name to the lounge. It was the most hilarious discussion I was ever a part of. We came up with names from Caravan to Car to Garage to Beetle to Shoe to Pumpkin to just The Lounge. Other out-of-the-box suggestions worth mentioning - Strapless, Victorious Secret, The Marsh (as home to Schnappy the cute Alligator), How We Met Each Other, Country Bumpkins Lounge (CB Lounge), Harlem (from one uncle), Whats-up lounge and Day-glo. The Burrow came up a little late and was first shot down the way every suggestion was shot down with inexplicable vengeance. It was only when Teju let everyone know that Manasa was going to stand in the middle of the road till a bus hit her unless we make peace that things settled down and we zeroed in on The Burrow, thanks to Johari.

We had to put several night-outs to set things up. We even painted the "table" ourselves. It looks really nice in the pic (inset), but I can't say the same about it in reality. But we hadn't taken into the account the most fatal issue - dogs. We tried everything to keep them away, including naphthalene balls, but settled to keeping everything covered under old flexi banners. We did not want to formally inaugurate the lounge until we found a permanent solution to this problem. We were considering more cruel methods like pepper or DDT to keep them away. But meanwhile, someone complained about lounges in the hostel. There was going to be an inspection. They dismantled everything and locked it up in A-213. That is where everything still lies, undone. Sigh..