The one thing PGPR tried to teach us was sticking to the rules.
There were rules to keep the kitchen clean.
There were rules to use the fridge properly.
There were rules to keep it down after 8 pm.
There were rules for showering.
There were even rules for taking a dump.
But the most important rule of all was not to have sex. Ever.
Boys and girls lived on separate floors. The floors had a trilayer security. The lift would only take us to our own floors. The cluster gate would respond to our individual keys. Then there was the corner of our room.
We were not supposed to bring anyone of the opposite sex in our rooms.
On the off chance that we managed to bring one, we were supposed to keep our doors AJAR, lest Lucifer could lure us into doing anything funny.
Of course, all these rules are redundant, I thought. Anyone who can even think about having sex in this blast furnace deserves a prize for fertility.
Apparently, NUS did not share my view. Not being reassured about the success of these contingency plan, NUS had decided to add an additional step to program us.
We had to take a Qualifying English Test in our first year. Most of the students who had their O Levels were decent in the English. But we had to take the test anyways. It seemed like a stupid, pointless test then. A lot of our professors had such horrendous accents that understanding proper English seemed to be a disadvantage. Proper English wasn’t a viable mode of communication either. But that’s for another post.
But the QET was supposed to filter us.
Well the test went like this. We were given two articles, and based on the articles, we were supposed to answer questions.
For our batch, the first article was about communicable diseases spread by sex. Not unprotected sex, just premarital sex.
The second one was about the social repercussions of premarital sex, and why it is bad. Well, after all this time, this is all I remember.
The question was something like – Is premarital sex good for you? Support your arguments using the provided passages.
Everyone who supported premarital sex failed. It’s kind of common sense, really. Because you were supposed to use the two articles to support your argument.
I believe that the plan to sexually repress people in the campus backfired horribly.
You see, when you take in intelligent people and lock them up in little cells, their creativity festers. The will find strange ways to compensate for their sexual depravities.
For a vast majority of the students, it was porn.
I had an Indian friend who was nicknamed Mr Terrabyte, because he was sharing his vast collection in the intranet. Not that it was necessary, though, because if you were not intelligent enough to bypass the endless cycle of fake porn websites, you would have an overly eager friend who would introduce you. A lot of us from sex deprived cultures realised that a surefire way to become popular was to discuss and distribute porn. Some idiots like me, were surfing through the endless loops of fake porn sites. Some were a bit better, and found out the free, standard ones. Others soon got used to this, and began to get subscriptions. One of them, I believe, got caught by our IT management, and got fined. That did not stem the flow of pornversion in any of us.
Of course, there were other, more adventurous, ones.
Some genius had decided to nourish his carnal desires by taking snapshots of girls in their showers. They didn’t teach us that in our ‘uses of smartphone technology’ class. Of course, he was caught and deported off promptly.
A couple of them were found jerking off to random things by the pond behind the residence. When approached by apprehensive women, they ran away.
Let me share one last weird experience I had in PGPR.
R, a close friend living in the opposite room, came to me one day and said, “I can’t sleep.”
I suggested the most common medication.
“I can’t sleep because there are some guys having sex in the next room.”
I did not believe it at first. If anyone was having sex in PGPR, they would be doing it with the utmost secrecy.
The next day, I decided to check out the matter.
I heard a knock on my door at 2 am.
I came out. R was standing in the corridor.
“I don’t hear anything.” I said.
Wait for it. He said.
It began slowly. And at its peak, it sounded painful. Whatever we were hearing, it did not sound the least bit like pleasure. There was a very high pitched voice that wailed out periodically.
I felt violated.
“They are actually going at it – prison style.”
“Should we complain?”
“They are at it every night. Two guys. The fat one comes down from the seventh floor.” said R. “He is the screamer.”
“I don’t care. Why do they have to be so loud?”
The wailing were so loud at this point, it was hard to stay in the corridor.
“It sounds painful.” I said, after a while.
“Maybe that’s how they roll.”
“Well, what can you do?”
Once the shock factor had passed, I felt happy at the fact that the guys were exploring a tiny bit of freedom in the prison we were stuck in. Who was I to judge?
The other residents were not so lenient.
A couple of weeks later, on one fine morning, three resident assistants and the resident head was banging against the door incessantly. I guess the resident head was worried about his cushy accommodation. You see, ‘unnatural’ sex is illegal in Singapore (Of course, you can still get condoms and vibrators in 7-11s, but I guess they are natural). While the guys might have genuinely been in love, the act they were committing might have struck the resident head as highly illegal.
When the door finally opened, it was the small frame of an young Vietnamese guy. We suppose his friend had escaped out the window, as it was a room on the ground floor.
I never saw the fat guy with the incredibly soft voice.
I hope they found out other ways to find peace.
Science Ruins Everything 