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])