The Curious Case of the Malnourished Chicken

It may sound weird coming from a vegetarian who eats only things 'green' or rather to quote my friends 'pullum vaikolum'. Coming to a semi-closure of exams and with the smell of holidays already in the air, all of us friends took an evening out to have a birthday treat. This treat was apparently for the 'trouble' we went into to organize a birthday celebration for one of our friends midway through the exams. It all started this weekend when we realized that the birthday was up in two days. Immediately we started chalking down plans and got ourselves ready for the big night! We had to wake our dear 'padipist' from sleep and had to make her cut the cake and invite her for her very own 'theppu' festival! And all that she could think of saying was, 'Thanks guys for the trouble you have been up to'. Telling this to a jobless Compsci, you are sure to get some witty remark and all I could think of in the middle of the night was, 'Ya. Huge trouble. We had to bring the cake all the way from Uganda!'(This is the abridged version and my friends know very well how far I can go with a chali and hence am not posting it here!) And thus came about a treat for the birthday and the auspicious day did come...
With other important matters to take care of, I ended up late for the treat and made my friends wait. It was when I reached there that I realized that the 'Soda lime salt' that had been ordered around half an hour back had not yet arrived. We kept on reminding them about this order and finally it came. This was the huge drink that MG had ordered and after taking a sip of it her expression said it all. Then all of us took a sip of it to understand what the issue was and it was the 'pinch' of salt they had put. The only plausible reasoning for it was that they must have put a 'pinch' of salt for every reminder we had given them. Finally all of us helped in finishing off the drink and had a supplementary drink after that to get our taste buds into action again. This was not the first time this was happening. The 'heartthrob' she had asked for (in another place) was also unavailable. The poor kid was subjected to a lot of 'theppu' that day for the same reason!
Next up was the Canteen (mainly because all the chicken items in the earlier place was over by the time we went). We went there to have an early dinner and had to wait for 5 minutes to get the non-vegetarians to decide what they were having. The ruckus, I must say, was for deciding whether they wanted a Chicken Fried Rice or Chicken Noodles. I mean, what difference is it going to make?! Chicken was anyway THE menu! Finally the decision was to go with both and the vegetarians went with dosa. So as we cleaned our plates with the last remnants of food, the non-vegetarians were still gorging on the chicken items.
We came back to the hostel and that is when one of my dear friends ( referred to as X from now) remembers about the chicken in the mess. All that I could do then was stare at her and wonder about her craze for chicken. Now to talk about X for a while. She is a true mallu at heart or rather stomach. She claims to eat anything and everything that will not bite her back (another mallu trait) which I find very silly because obviously you are not going to eat anything while its alive, or will you? With mallus you never know. The craze for non-veg food is so rampant that I sometimes wonder what I am doing in its midst. I keep on telling X that she is the biggest chicken lover I have ever met. But its just not chicken. The way my friends here wait for the mess to open just to get some non-veg food is unbelievable. While the vegetarians here start countdowns for holidays the non-vegetarians on the other hand have various countdowns in a week, one for chicken fry, one for chicken curry, one for fish curry, one for chicken fried rice and so on... And there are many more such items but am not mentioning them for fear of getting beaten up by any mallu for making him/her drool. All my friends wake up in the morning wondering what would be there for breakfast and on hearing 'dosa' all they have to say is 'Chicken dosa? :D'. Yes people, I get the point. Anything vegetarian can be converted to a non-veg. The first thing that any of them do on entering a restaurant is count the number of non-veg items in the menu and just like in any cartoon series I can see eyes popping out here and there. Any restaurant is rated on the quantity of non-veg food it offers more than the quality. Especially if the restaurant's name has anything to do with non-veg then extra points. Whenever all of us go out together, the vegetarians make do with whatever veg that is available and the non-vegs will still be deciding whether a shawarma or a bucket of chicken or anything else is better. Just tease them about this and immediately the retort comes, ' Its after all pullu and vaikol. Just choose whether you want it fresh or dry :P' After years of studying girl psychology my tip to any guy is get a girl a plate of great non-veg food and half the battle is won!
So as I was saying, X enters our Lionel 'MESS-I' and gets her share of chicken fry and comes out. Though I'm not great at judging such food, I could realize something immediately. I am aware that a chicken leg has a bone in it but at the same time that is not all it has! But the fry that came out of the mess was something like this:



I, myself, felt bad for X, though she did not have much of a reaction, which I assume is because she gets such chicken every other day. And yet the countdown for chicken fried rice that will be made available on Sundays continue! Mallus, true loyalty, it is...

(Dedicated to all my dear friends [:P])

Exams = Creativity

Exam time calls for creativity and that is exactly what has been happening around here. This time around there were a lot of creatures who were as jobless as me.
To start with...Creature Number 2 ( had a terrible Maths paper that I'm going to forgo all my love for the number game), my sweet big bro. At a safe distance greater than 20 kms away from me where only my voice reaches he found his so-called haven. With his internship supposed to be at full swing all he finds time for is to message and call me for all the affairs concerned with this world. For once, all those trivial things in my life caught his fascination or rather his imagination. All my naïve [;)] one-liners and messages were subjected to much speculation that I actually realized that the guy has not listened to even one interesting word I'd said in the last two years. Calls every now and then, confessing that the sole reason for the call was to bug me and leave me irritated for the next hour and a half, followed by messages was the usual routine. Essence of the blah I've written – Interns are jobless!
Creature Number 3 – My dad! Just like the pranks he has been pulling off from as long as I can remember he found the perfect timing this time around too. From pranks that had made me cry when I was 3 years old to now, that guy has not changed one bit and neither have I! I still fall head over heels for everything he says or does. This time around too the fall was pretty huge, if I can say that. Again at the end of this self-proclaimed belated April Fool's prank all that I have to say is, “ A few more days before you are paying heavily for this mister.”
Creature Number 4 – Or rather creatures. It has to be none other than my friends. Starting from the 5 days apparent study leave all of us have become experts at inventing ways of using time productively, as we refer to it. We started the 'study week' royally by going out for lunch to the closest available restaurant and came to the conclusion that we had to do this more often. All thanks to me, I must say! This time our usual antics gave way to new ones. The latest one that we came up was a poster! All of us were done making formal posters and so we just grabbed this golden chance to see each other on a poster. It must have been all the farewell hangovers. This graffiti up on my wall, which we now call the 'Ironing and Postering' wall, has been the interesting poster that we have ever come up with. With special art work from MG, it just showed us that second year wasn't as boring as it seemed to have been. All stories and nightmares have found a special place in this piece of paper so much so that our club juniors would have a terrific day out if they laid their hands on this. Though it just took an hour to do the work, it has been updated time and again with long-forgotten stories. With this up in my room, all of us take a minute or so every day to admire the work that has gone into it and just observe a moment of silence thinking of what all has been etched forever and what have been passing fancies. The DJ and the movie-dialogue sessions in the room has also come under ridicule. It just takes some random music to have me and Anju in splits. Maybe this is what is called exam hysteria or maybe just some not-so-random jokes. Another one of our favourite hobbies has to be posting rubbish on each other's Facebook wall and then deleting it as soon as the thread is over. If people find it weird, I don't disagree. When did I ever say that we all think normal?!
And for the grand finale... Creature Number 1 has to be I,Me, Myself! [:D] With just half my exams done and the other half still singing lullabies to me I have been finding time to do every other trivial thing or maybe not-so-trivial after all. Cleaning up the room for the umpteenth time, doing some laundry, chatting nonsense, packing to leave for home (which is sadly a week away still), an unsuccessful attempt at catching forty winks and now this... In the middle of the night with sleep evading me, surprisingly, I sit idly listening to some good music and watching the rain through my window... That sounds too romantic... Oh... Whatever! I guess its time to sleep after all.