'MESS'ING THINGS UP....!!!

            What are the three basic necessities of life? Even a newborn could easily reply to this as food, clothing and shelter. But, only a hosteller knows how difficult it is satisfy these needs in the day – to – day life, even more than a daily wager. You get your costumes and the other add – ons from our home, so one out of the three is perfectly fine. Shelter, well, it’s not that cozy and tranquil yet with your friends, everything is manageable. However, when it comes to the food, nobody, including your mom and dad or buddy can quench and satisfy you because it’s going to be you who have to experience and take the necessary efforts to eat it. You can wear others’ clothes, you can stay at whatever place you like, but you can’t eat someone’s food or fill up somebody’s hunger.

            There are so many ways to reduce weight and look slim and people spend millions in such oil – pulling and treadmill activities. But, my first and best bet would be to stay at a hostel and survive with whatever they term as snacks, meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner. First, you save those bucks being wasted on health consultants and the creams and tablets and tonics they provide. Secondly, the hedonism of eating would be lost in you to the utmost extent that you’d prefer to be in a Ramzan fasting. So, let’s move on to the daily routine of us hostellers. There are numerous ways of preparing to go the mess, several other kinds of calling people to accompany us and umpteen types of walking styles.

            On a working day, the rapid strides and runs of students could be seen in the morning. Especially on Mondays, when most people wake up lazily only after the hot sun rays strike their face, it becomes an uphill task to take bath, change to formal looks and then do the all impossible task of eating after travelling (yeah, by ‘travelling’, I mean it) a distance of some 500 metres (ok, a little bit of exaggeration doesn’t hurt). To add to it, if you prefer to concentrate on your diet, you’ve to face the abuses and scorns of those ever – stricter profs. Mostly, the mess doesn’t suit the students’ needs because they like every item other than what is being regularly served in the mess or they start disliking and detesting it because of its taste. Mostly, people tend to skip breakfasts here because the ulcer we get due to lack of eating properly is better than the diarrhoea and vomiting sensations we accumulate just merely on seeing it. The way of eating breakfast determines which bench a particular student would be sitting in the class and even what grade he gets. For example, a guy with a backpack must be a topper if he runs through the mess to sit in some awkward position and gobble whatever he feels like eating without even realizing what is it at the last minute and the same guy should be a last – bencher if he leisurely enjoys the ‘delicacy’ (!!!), forgetting about the time.

            Coming to the lunch session, it can be visualized as the peak hour traffic or the kind of congestion we face while trying to take our vehicle from a crowded theatre. There are those people who wait in a long, endless queue for omelettes; there are sambar lovers, who would gradually be caressing the food hill with droplets of it; then, there are these horrible dishes. After galloping through all these obstacles, finding that particular table which has a ceiling fan atop it is the next step. Here, you have to mostly face contraries. Getting a good place doesn’t guarantee a company with your best buddy; he or she might be sitting somewhere else. The entire phenomenon of eating would become futile if there’s a moron who discusses about academics and studies, rather than adais and sambars. This situation can be visualized to two guys getting corner seats in a movie hall. The entire effect of housefull boardin your belly would get drained by the time you reach the classroom after walking back for quite a large distance and climbing some two or three storeys. I believe people come to the mess just because of the psychological fear about ulcer; else, that food we eat is no way nearer to the distance covered to come and return.

            The most hilarious period is the time during dinner. There are many reasons for this. You get unlimited time to eat; you can dine with all your friends. There are certain pre – requisites. Gathering companions is the most important but time – consuming one. Calling friends from various hostels mostly takes up the lion’s share of my mobile balance. Then, the meeting spot should be decided. It would mostly be the junction of two or three hostels or the coffee shop. So from there, somebody should initiate the task of walking toward the mess. Otherwise, guys would forget the ultimate purpose by mocking at one another and gossiping about the pre – marital and extra – marital relationships of various popular personalities. After that, it would take some 5 times the usual duration of walking to the mess because we would be blocking the entire road and on the way, one guy or the other may confront some of his seniors or other acquaintances. Finally, we would have reached the mess after 45 minutes of the first guy’s call.

            Let’s take a specific case of dosa for our reference; there are certain knacks of getting dosas for the second round. Our mess has this strange habit of serving people who had already completed their first course first rather than those poor, innocent guys, who keep on waiting patiently for hours without even tasting a piece. We tend to excise our Indian mind of utilising the flaws in the constitution. There are some rare nights, when some of our friends may lag behind us. In those times, in order to keep everyone intact, he would directly come with an empty plate, get a piece of dosa from another guy and spread it to the whole plate so as to leave some patches of it scattered all around the area of plate. Now, he has ‘finished’ his first round and it becomes easier for him to go for the next by skipping the queue.

            And since we have been demarcated in the second year into various hostels based on our departments, the only place of get – together is obviously the mess, which unites us. So, we would always find happiness in sitting idly even after eating with the hand and our plate getting dried, chatting with machans. I have even heard about some incidents from seniors that they used to sit till the watchman locks up the mess. This mess hangout almost paves the way for willingly skipping the record works and assignments as we would go to some other guy’s room and continue chatting there, due to the aftermath of the conversations at the mess.

            However, these two hours of being at the mess for no valuable purpose and its effects have not been deterred till date by the scolds and reduction of marks for record submission. Finally, in a nutshell, I would rather say that we are the only set of people, who tolerate the worst ever food by making it up in a polished manner by creating an illusion of enjoying ourselves.