Mess, messy and messier

Sometimes I wonder if the word "mess" was coined by someone who has endured the food in a boarding institution. No autobiography of any engineer is complete without the mention of the hostel mess. After the excruciating journey of 22Km, with an unscheduled pit stop at the local bridge, we were so exhausted to eat that for the initial few days it was very difficult for us to complain. With the pocket money really tight, it was difficult to eat outside everyday. The food was basically divided into various nutrient groups.

1. Carbohydrates(rice)
2. Proteins (the daal, oh! great daal. It was difficult to make out what was floating on top, a cricket, a fly or something else)
3. Vitamins (a gooey mixture of vegetables which were in a really disgusting state before being cooked)
4. The minerals

One particular note here is the 4th bullet. We were living in an industrial sector on the outskirts on the town. There would be no deficiency of minerals like chromates, dichromates, oxides ... and all the pollutants there could be in the water that was used to cook. But again, since that was "The Boot Camp", it is the place were you are given the basic training to sustain, the training to survive. I could bet on the fact that it hardened a couple of mummy's babies into men.

If the food was not bad enough, one would look at the worker's conditions to make sure that the hunger would pass away. But we were the survivors of a holocaust, called the 'IIT-JEE' & 'EDCIL'. It was not like in the days of 'Nazi Germany'. We were never starved to death or gassed. We ourselves chose to starve. An average loss of 10 kg was a common thing in those early days. Often the smoke from a near by industrial installation would engulf the hostel. We would then salvage for anything to cover our faces and try not to breathe. The worst hit were, the 'park view' and 'pool view' rooms. We in the penitentiary-like rooms were protected by the closed nature of the rooms. But let’s not wander off from our subject which was 'food'.

As I said we were survivors, we found ways to survive as all survivors would do. We found the magic of '2 minutes'. A preparation simple to make and provided enough nutrition, supplemented by a few eggs to pull us through 6 days of the week. On the 7th day we had a feast. On a local street side restaurant, me and couple of friends would enjoy for just Rs. 70, half a chicken cooked in a mouth watering gravy cooked generously in butter, with the great "Indian Roomali roti". That was our energy cell that took us through the week. One might feel this to be an exaggeration but, it is not. The mess in a way made us appreciate, what quality food really meant.