Today I made bread omelette for breakfast. While eating this breakfast, I went into a flashback of the past. The time when I was in college and when I was staying in hostel away from my home. I thought I should share my memories today. I love to pen down things in my diary, but today I shall type it in this blog post. Soon after completing my graduation, I thought of studying further as I wanted to make my dreams come true.
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| Image credits: Shutterstock |
My mother was worried as I had never stayed away from home. But I was focused, I wanted to apply for higher studies in Karnataka. I cleared the entrance and then one fine day, my mom came to drop me to hostel. Soon after finding the room allotted to me, we decided to have lunch. We all ate food in the hostel as mom wanted to taste how the food in mess was. Mom did not like the food and she wondered how I’ll survive on that “bad tasting” food. But she had no choice and had to drop me off at the hostel.
Some of my friends used to go out to nearby food joints like “Balu’s Wada Pav” joint, whenever they felt hungry. However I used to survive on hostel food and college canteen food. Sometimes we used to go to the mess in the boys hostel in our college as the mess was open to all during lunch time. The food at that mess was much better than that served at my hostel. At the end of the 1st year, my roommates were down with typhoid and by grace of God I was saved.
Somehow 1 year passed by and for the 2nd year me and my friends shifted to a paying guest facility where a lady from Goa used to send us “dabba’s” packed with yummy food like fish curry and rice. The problem got solved.
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| Image credits: Shutterstock |
The food served in messes and hostels is always a problem. Mostly the quality is bad and people fall sick due to the unhygienic conditions in which they cook the food. My husband used to tell me lots of food stories from his college hostel where the food was completely pathetic. He passed out from one of the top colleges in India – now known as NITK. But the food was never good even there. The chapattis used to have butterfly wings stuck into it and the fried rice used to be served with burnt cockroaches. Students had to compromise a lot to get good quality education. Now after 15 years the food quality might have improved there.
But I can list some top BCOM colleges in Mumbai, where the food served in messes and hostels is very good. There are lots of caterers who cook very good food in college canteens and hostel messes as they think that students should be healthy. But some others mostly cook bad quality food as they think that the students studying there will never complain about the bad quality. Only after/during food inspections, the food taste improves.
Ok, coming back to my hostel days… since the food in my hostel was bad, I used to sometimes go to my relatives place over the weekends where my aunt used to cook something nice for me. There I even learnt to cook some dishes like Gobi Manchurian and veg fried rice from my cousin brother who was into hotel management. We did not have a gas in the hostel and were not allowed to cook. Hence I never really cooked something there other than instant noodles using a hot plate which we were using by hiding from the rector. If I knew to cook this delicious food as I can cook now, I could have had the best time of my life even if I stayed in a hostel.
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