Dubloo Mess: 2 Life Changing Experiences

It was in 2002, if you follow the Christian calender, when I landed at 18 degrees latitude and 79.58 degrees longitude on the face of the earth. You guessed it right, I was in Warangal, abbreviated as W (read Dubloo), at the uber-popular (ok ok, quite popular) National Institute of Technology Warangal, lovingly abbreviated as NITdubloo.

It was my first outing away from family, and boy - what a place for outing!! It was the Gulti-est place in the world (if you know what Gulti means, that is). And apart from introductions, missing girls, ragging, bragging and 132 other such things, there was one thing which bothered us the most during those initial days - Mess. This word - 'mess' - came into popular usage from 'a messdeck aboard ships' where military personnel used to socialize and eat, possibly leaving a literal mess for janitors to clean-up. And hence the ritual of keeping the place filthy and obnoxious continues all across the globe, probably on other planets too.

There are a few things special about any mess – 1: The odor inside is always consistent no matter the time or cuisine. and 2: The faces of boarders and servers (not the computer server) never change in 100 years. 2-Corollary: The way people eat in a mess also doesn't change in 1000 years.

Usually, discussions about any college mess can be consummated into a book, and NITdubloo mess was no different. However, there are two personal life changing experiences from our mess that I’d like to talk about – The Sunday Palak Paneer and The Sqaure Cut (which is incidentally a proof for 2-Corollary above).

The Sunday Palak Paneer: There is something about Indian paneer that people never seem to get bored of. And if you are in NITdubloo, you seem to eat its new breed every Sunday. Every Sunday afternoon, we were served with a bowl full of what they’d like to call as palak gravy. But wait, there was no paneer in it. You see, paneer is such a precious commodity that only the worthy are served with. It’s like the Nobel Prize which you earn and value as a prized possession, all 2 pieces of it. Yes, after proper deliberation, police verification and background check all done by the mess supervisor, we were served with 2 pieces of paneer, cuboids in shape with dimensions 10mm x 10 mm x 30 mm. 30 mm comes last because you treasure it so much that you are never able to finish it. And if you reach late, you don’t get any, just like Nobel Prize, which is never awarded posthumously. Though nobody liked it, fights often ensued to grab each other’s share. Spongy like the Flubber and cooked in filthy grey-colored grease, those paneer pieces made us realize the worth of good food and millions of students like us who live without it. It left me with so much penitence and grief that I pledged not to eat paneer ever again.

I continued my pledge for four years, thanks to the equally bad paneer at IMT, though of a different genre. I have started eating paneer again recently after I joined Infy.

The Sqaure Cut: Witnessing 2-Corollary in NITdubloo was the second life changing experience for me. The Square Cut, as we code-worded it, was a peculiar style of eating rice, patented by none other than the Gultis (also known as Madrasis in north India). The Gultis rarely eat Roti, never if it is served in mess like ours where Rotis (known as Phulka in our mess) were made once a month and stocked till they last. Gultis love rice, in all flavors and colors – yellow, white, green, purple, black, brownish-red, magenta et al. And they eat it as if no one is watching. Put lot of rice in the middle of plate, pour 1 jug of sambar, 1 jug of rassam, 2 bowls of curd, fold your sleeves till shoulders and attack. Even with so much of viscose stuff flowing around, a true Gulti manages to make it into a ball, rolling and tossing it around, and then gobbling it. He continues the process with learned concentration. Then the moment comes when there is no rice around and plate is left with unsolicited yellowish semi viscose fluid. With long practiced perfection, the Gulti spreads his hand straight as an arrow, elbow at 90 degrees to the shoulder with palm facing west and places it on the plate. With one master stroke of right speed and momentum, the Gulti caresses his hand capturing the fluid in hand and dropping it in mouth with lightening speed. He doesn’t even spare the unapologetic drops of fluid dripping down the arm and lick it right up through the palm. The whole process takes a nano-second and would put Dravid’s square-cut to shame. This age old method of finishing rice is many times rumored as the inspiration of Sqaure Cut in cricket - and hence the name.

Grieving with my inability to perfect this technique, I pledged not to eat rice with hands ever again. Thankfully, God made spoons and saved me the embarrassment. I eat rice only with spoons ever since.