Is That Why They Call It A “Mess”?

A friend who studied at IIT-Kharagpur used to narrate an interesting anecdote. One night at dinner in their hostel mess, they came face to face with a dark, gooey substance masquerading as the sabzi for the day. It was as foul-looking as it smelt. None of them had a clue as to what vegetable had been mutilated thus. They came out of the mess, read the dinner menu on the notice board, only to discover that the near-toxic substance was meant to be baigan ka bharta.
Almost everyone who has lived in a hostel will have these messy tales to narrate: of how their tastebuds were held hostage for three or four years by people resembling the cook character in Beau Peep comics.
My experience is much better than my friend’s and as such I don’t have any horror tales to narrate. If you were willing to put up with the rubbery rotis and the unimaginative and oily curries, or, alternately, if you were willing to survive three years solely on the strength of thayir-sadam and avakai, you would do just fine. That is what I used to do on most of the days, just eat the chawal with dahi embellished with Amma’s endless supply of yummy pickle. Sundays were special with thick, fat aaloo parathas and mixed veg pickle and lots of creamy dahi: more than adequate compensation for the rest of the week.
Of course, for the 300-hungry denizens of the ‘residence hall’, the most important meal of the day was tea. Never mind that the bread pakodas came swimming with their very own oil slicks, or that the puffs were as dry as ‘Jaani’ Rajkumar’s dialogue delivery, ignore the fact that the servings of pizza were measly. Forget nutritional value, forget everything else, the fun lay in the anticipation with which we would all troop down to the mess to see was on offer: poha, puffs, pastry, pakoda, (heck! Never noticed the p-fixation of the menu earlier). All this downed with several cupfuls of good, strong chai.
But the meal that I personally looked forward to the most was breakfast. And to their credit, the mess guys at my hostel did manage to make it a gala affair. There was plain bread, toast (buttered and unbuttered), jam, cheese spread, baked beans, eggs (boiled, poached and omlettes), corn flakes, milk, fruit and coffee and tea.
I remembered all this as today I had this irresistible craving for toast-butter: the crisp and crunchy on the outside but slightly soft inside, oozing golden maska variety of toast-butter that the bhaiyyajis at my mess turned out by the shovelfuls each morning.
The health-conscious lot would veer towards the crisp, dry, unbuttered variety while the gluttons would make a dash for the buttered toast racks. Move on further down, hand a spoon to the miserly assistant warden and watch her slightly dip it into a cheese spread jar and shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it till a very thin film of the creamish condiment apologetically clung to the spoon. Pick up a bowl, fill it with cornflakes, pick up a glass of milk, pick up a fruit, greedily eye the fruit on friend’s plate and pointedly ask, ‘You sure you want to eat that’, suppress a satisfied smirk as friend unceremoniously dumps aforementioned fruit into your plate, cautiously balance the piled-up place while staving off the hungry masses who trooped in bleary-eyed. Go to your customary table plonk down next to the window and dig in. Sheer bliss. Soon enough, the sun would seem brighter and cheerier and if you strained your ears, through the din of all that morning traffic you could even hear the birds chirp. Grrrraaahh!! Now I am hungry.

Night Shi(f)t

Ouch, ouch and ouch! Just read this and cringed on behalf of my compatriots in the media and BPO sectors. Having been there and done that for nearly seven years, I know how these ungodly timings can play havoc with your system. At least in the newspaper, it was slighhhhhtly better. We got to go home "relatively early", say by 2 am or so. But my BPO stint was living hell. For three-odd months, a colleague and I were forced to do complete all-nighters every alternate week. Come in to work at 10.30 pm and leave by 7 am. I could never manage to make up for the lack of sleep even in the daytime. The doorbell or the phone would keep ringing: someone trying to sell me a credit card or a loan, the dhobi, the cook, the postman, or the landlord's nosy watchman wanting to know why my flatmate had been dropped home late at night by "a-guy-who-did-not-really-look-like-her-brother-and-was-he-really-her-cousin-as-she-claims..."
As a result of all the sleep debt which kept accumulating, I began to look and sound like something out of The Living Dead. Meanwhile, the health of my colleague took a major beating. When the doctor gave him an ultimatum to do something about the crazy timings, we both figured enough was enough.
At that time, we did not do too much work for the US. The bulk of our work came from Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and India. The rationale for introducing night shifts in our department was the "off-chance" that someone in the Far East may decide to send in something very early. My colleague and I systematically tabulated the volume of work that came in during the night in those three months. We found that most of the work which came in later in the evening was something that could be dealt with by the earlier shift which left at 11.30, or even if work landed at night, it was something that could wait till the next morning when the 8 'o' clock shift came in. And if it was that urgent, we could always put in an extra hour or two.
Armed with this excel sheet, we went to our boss and argued that we were ready to come in earlier and stay on till 2.30 am, but if the all-nighters continued, she would have the distinction of having two corpses as her employees. She was not too keen, nevertheless relented half-heartedly. And things marginally improved thereon.
I am back in a newspaper now. This time round, I have shamelessly laid down terms that I will not RPT not work night shifts. I realise that I may be committing professional harakiri because the bulk of the work happens at night. And this being a small centre, they will be more than happy to hand it over to me. And yes, sometimes when I wake up in the morning and look at the paper, I cringe at something which I know had it been done by me, would have turned out better.
But I remind myself that I was the one who chose to put family ahead of everything else. And in the end, that is what is most important to me in the long term.

I realise...

I love Bombay. I hate Bombay. A two-day trip over the weekend reinforced this.
Got a chance to meet up with old flatmates and a friend from the old office. It is amazing how just six months can make a world of difference, not just in my life, but also in the lives of those who were in it.
I thought this trip would assuage that unfathomable longing that has been tugging at me . But now I realise that what I was missing was not a geographical place per se but a place in time. And nothing I do can ever bring that back.
This trip also made me realise that this city, home to me for 4 years, is no longer mine. Neil Diamond comes to mind:
...these days I'm caught between two shores
LA's fine but it ain't home,
New York's home but it ain't mine no more...