Of Mess Food and Indigestion

01 : The Dictionary Entry

mess (mĕs)
n.

1. A disorderly or dirty accumulation, heap, or jumble: left a mess in the yard.
2. 1. A cluttered, untidy, usually dirty condition: The kitchen was a mess.
   2. A confused, troubling, or embarrassing condition; a muddle: With divorce and bankruptcy proceedings pending, his personal life was in a mess.
   3. One that is in such a condition: clothes that were a mess after painting the ceiling; made a mess of their marriage.
3. 1. An amount of food, as for a meal, course, or dish: cooked up a mess of fish.
   2. A serving of soft, semiliquid food: a mess of porridge.
4. 1. A group of people, usually soldiers or sailors, who regularly eat meals together.
   2. Food or a meal served to such a group: took mess with the enlistees.
   3. A mess hall.

02 : The Context

As many of you, who are well aware of the strange language called English, the above excerpt from the dictionary shows the various uses of the word mess in its noun form. I just didn't wish to make that list any longer by incorporating the verbs and the phrasals.
In this article I'll be focussing myself, without the use of any convex lens, on the fourth point stated above. In our hostel/hall of residence, we have a strange place called a mess and surprisingly it generates so much aura via its grandiosity that people do not hesitate to avoid it altogether provided they are not so hard on cash.
For those belonging to the group of lesser intelligent human beings, let me give you an example : Our mess offers four meals a day - the breakfast, the lunch, the evening snacks and the dinner. In the entire last week my mess visit counter showed me that I had only 5 meals out of 26 meals that were offered in the mess. (No, I'm not poor in mathematics, I know 7x4=28 but we have our mess off on Saturday evenings and hence no snacks or dinner on that day.)
The most surprising part is that the newcomers find our mess food so delicious, so toothsome that it sometimes makes me wonder what kind of alimentary canal do these guys own. But then I think of myself and realise that it's no just them but even when I was a newcomer, I enjoyed the food very much.
This led to a quest to unveil the magic of the delicacy known as mess food.


03 : The Consequences of the Ingestion of Mess Food

Here are some of the weird consequences I had to face after I had taken enough of that mess food.

1. I realised that my alimentary canal got screwed big time and I wasn't able to digest food other than those belonging to the genre of mess food
2. The food is so repulsive that I find it hard to differentiate between the goodness of a roadside dhaba (a place where one can have meal at a very cheap price) and the greatness of a restaurant cuisine.
3. One fine morning I decide to have breakfast and I end up pushing a half-cooked dhosa (a South Indian dish) through my oesophagus, down into my gut. Halfway through the class, I had to actually ask the instructor to let me return to my hostel room. So I learned a very good lesson - Half-cooked dhosa leads to half-attended lectures and full-cooked dhosa leads to full-attended lectures.
4. I often fell so frustrated that I listen to death metal bands. Frankly, I cant distinguish the sounds that those bands make and the sounds that my gut makes after I have had a nice meal in the mess - God forbid!
5. I started developing a keen interest in subjects that don't make sense after I had a crush on mess food. I feel that Chewbacca Defence is better than Cheerleader Defence and that all species with 23 pairs of chromosomes should have the right to exercise any of them in order to defend themselves and that doesn't make any sense.
6. I started spending too much on food these days. The amount spent is so large that my father was worried about me suspecting I started taking drugs.
7. I don't curse people these days by saying 'f**k you' but I actually use 'Let mess food bless your taste buds'.
   
8. I feel that the terrible grammer and spelling sense that I developed and that is on display in the last two posts can be actually attributed to the ingestion of mess food. I also have a very strong feeling about the fact that my sense of humour has been influenced a lot by this genre of delicious cuisine.

Isn't that a problem grave enough? Don't I have the right to choose what goes into my stomach? Why is it that these guys always take advantage of our meek, submissive stomach? Why is it that we have to face the revolt that out stomachs declare against us?


04 : Data Acquisition and ANALysis

"What goes in must come out" - so says the old man.

So I finally took the sword and went out for a quest to unveil the mysteries of the ancient delicacy known to the human species as mess food.

• The mess is in its true form a mess. A factor that ascertains the existence of the 1st definition of the word in the 4th definition. Very few words can have such intra-linked definition.
• It lacks both the infrastructure and the ultrastucture, thereby forcing the mess workers to rely on obsolete methods to prepare cuisines. This actually leads to inaccuracy, in other words half-cooked dhosas and over burnt rotis (Indian bread made of wheat sans yeast).
• The mess workers are more keen on taking as much food as possible so that their wives don't have to spend much time in the kitchen. This ensures two things - a. Safety issues are taken care of; the husband a.k.a. the mess worker is at a lesser risk from being injured by flying pots and pans and b. Personal issues are taken care of; the husband doesn't have to rely on imported erotic media to enjoy an orgasm.
• The poor service delivered actually leads to less demand of food. Lesser demand ensures lesser consumption and which eventually leads to lesser production. With not much to do, the workers enjoy themselves with a bidi (The classic uncut Indian tobacco rolled in sal leaves) and have a nice gossip about the status and progress (I beg the reader not to take that word in its literal sense) of the political mechanism that exists in this place.
• The mess manager has nothing to do. Due to the consumption level, he is happy keeping an eye on the entries of the 'extras' book which gets filled everytime a person takes a mango drink or a chocolate from the refrigerator after he has been 'disillusified' by the food being offered.
• The food contains a generous amount of oil. An extensive research has shown that the maximum amount of false increase of price can be shown on the drums of oil, which paves the way for our very own manager to own an E class car.
  
• The guy on the mess duty looks on helplessly wishing he had the option to study something at that very point of time!!!
  

05 : The Postscript, the Aftword and the Epilogue

It's hard to watch poor people starving on the streets, begging for money. But it's even harder to watch a guy whose poor stomach has been infested by the demons of mess food. I wish the poor stays the same and starve to death than offer them mess food for free. I believe I'm being kind.
God save us!!!