The Parijat Wall

[Investigative] The Warden Tells Ping! About The Construction At Parijat

What started on a Monday morning with a loud screech of tyres, ended two weeks later as a peach coloured wall studded with broken glass on the top. The construction project began without warning on the 15th of September with around five to seven workers bringing in cement, sand and bricks in different sized lorries. And soon enough, the laying of bricks started. Alongside began speculations amongst the Parijaat A block residents, and really anyone else who noticed the mess created right next to the block, about what the construction project could be about.

Like all situations where facts are unknown, rumours began to be created about this one as well. The rumour that a gym is what was being built stuck around for a week. Many of course, did not believe that it would work out. It made no sense to have three gyms on campus for starters,  and absolutely no one I know was weighting for a gym to be built in Parijaat. So the target audience would be close to zero. A cafe or a canteen would definitely lift the bar for standards of living in Parijaat, but a gym, no. Before considering those anomalies in the rumour we’d have to talk about the biggest anomaly, the tree.

Beyond the black gate, the one that quite unnecessarily separates the land with the highest concentration of hair products,  the girls hostel, from the rest of the campus,  there existed a cute little bench next to a big tree. The tree had a cement ring built around it,  making it a perfect spot for anyone who is allowed in that area to sit or walk around, while chatting on the phone. With Greta Thunberg going out on a limb to make her point about saving the environment in as many ways as possible, there is no way that a harmless tree in a secluded area in college would be cut down without protest by the students. So the big question was, is the new Parijaat gym going to have a tree growing through its roof? 

Speaking about roofs, it was obvious to everyone that there was no roof being built by the workers a fortnight into the construction. This added to the dilemma of what this entire project was about, causing a couple of Telugu speakers to finally ask the workers themselves to elucidate on what was being built. The workers disclosed that they were building a storeroom. While the workers continued to raise the roof with loud equipment, constant chatter and noisy vehicles, it was still unclear why the said “storeroom” comprised of a single wall and did not have a roof. At this point, a couple of mails had been sent to the hostel warden complaining about the noise. No one liked having to wake up to bad sounding alarms, that weren’t even set by them, for two long weeks.

Finally, on the 28th of September, we woke up to a worker free area next to Parijat A block accessorised by a high wall. With all the construction mess gone, we noticed that in all this time a second wall had been built, identical to the first one, at the back of the block, and that two walls previously enclosing Parijaat had been broken down. It seemed like an elaborate effort to cut off access to the tree.

What we didn’t know however is that every New Paarijat block has extremely large, unused basement cellars with a door to access them from the tree area. Intel from Mrs.Kavitha, the Parijat hostel warden, clarified to us that the college wants to be able to store construction material comprising of cement and tools in the Parijat cellars instead of in Vindhya rooms where it is currently being stored. And, in order to ensure that the hostel residents are not disturbed by incoming and outgoing workers and vehicles trying to access the cellar, the walls were built , completely cutting off access to the door from inside campus, and at the same time ensuring that it can be accessed from outside campus by scaling the width of the Felicity Ground, or the road leading up to the Gachibowli Stadium. This SAC approved project cost the Parijaat residents the perfectly positioned bench, tree and two weeks of sleep and drove us up the wall trying to guess what was going on.