Today's Cafetaria Menu

After supplying plain boiled rice with sambar and rasam for the last goddam 200 years, the caterers in our cafetaria decided to add more variety to their offerings and came up with the following:

Ghee Rice: A disgusting thing, in which rice is mixed with ghee [something I have a life-long hatred for] and garnished with all those tiny things you garnish stuff with. Truly pukeworthy.

Bisibela Bath: Sambar Rice, with a lot of special effects [carrots, boondi(one of those things that can't be translated), and peanuts]. Supposedly solid food but ends up being of a pasty consistency. When swallowed, it flows down your throat like radioactive ooze, like thick slime down a drainage pipe.

Lemon Rice: Bright yellow in color, missing the main ingredient: lemon.

Tomato Rice: Rice mixed with Tomato gravy within which lurk several million annoying long rolled-up spiky pieces of tomato skin which invariably get stuck between your teeth, or, if swallowed, miraculously survive the acids of your stomach, only to, like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption, "come out clean on the other side".

Vangi Bath: Brinjal Rice. Tastes as disgusting as it sounds. Brinjals mixed with some weird powder and rice. Need I say more?

There are more, but none come to mind.


Anyway, today, those guys finally ran out of things to mix with the rice, and in the end, you won't believe what they came up with. Take a wild guess. Not in your wildest dreams would you imagine them to come up with...














Milk Rice Bath!

Rice mixed with goddam milk!!

And before you ask, no: I obviously did not try it. But I did ask a few colleagues who did not see the menu and ate it unknowingly. I was like "Hey... how's the milk rice?", and one of them turned red in the face. I asked another, who I did not lunch with, and judging by her about-to-puke expression, I didn't have to wait for her answer to figure out that she had eaten it. A while after she came to know, she told me she was feeling low [strongly suspected as a side-effect]. I suggested a cup of coffee to cheer her up, and gave her the idea to have black coffee, and when she asked me why, I told her that the black coffee would mix with the milk rice in her stomach to become coffee rice, and that this was something the cafetaria guys hadn't thought of [atleast not yet]. Needless to say, she did not find this idea very appealing.

Anyway, I know you guys won't believe me that there indeed exists something called 'Milk Rice Bath'. So at the risk of being labelled insane by all and sundry, I took a photo of the goddam cafetaria menu when everyone was around. Here it is:

Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny

I've got so much work these days, I feel like Joe Pesci in this clip...

Strange occurence at office

Weird shit just happened at office! I was working on some database-related work when suddenly a bloody bat (not the one used in frickin' cricket, but one of them Count Dracula ones) materialized out of nowhere and started flying all over the floor, coming damn close to me thrice or frice (frice, froce or whatever you call it when something happens four times). For a moment, I stood there shell-shocked. I mean, the last thing you expect when working on stored procedures at 11:45 in the night is a frickin' bat flying around you!!

A few seconds later, I called up reception, told them about the bat while ducking whenever it flew past me, and then ran like hell to the exit door, closed it behind me and watched through the small glass part of the door as it continued it's flight across our floor, hitting parts of the cieling once in a while. The reception guys came armed with a stick and they opened another exit door, but it didn't figure out that it could get out. One guy then swung at it a few times with the stick but missed. The other guy tried throwing a goddam floor mat on it, and after a few tries, hit it, and it fell down. They then surrounded the poor thing and hit it till it died.

I was depressed after they killed the bat. I wish they had been a little more patient with it by waiting to let it fly outside. It eventually would have. Killing it might not have meant anything to them, but I guess it would have made a world of difference to the bat. Hell... it probably had kids or something, which, thanks to the reception guys, would now be orphaned, and would be deprived of a proper upbringing. You know, after seeing all this, I don't really blame bats for biting humans and stuff. If I were a bat and they killed one of mine, I'd do more than just biting people on their necks. I'd have probably gone on a 'roaring rampage of revenge' like Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) did in Kill Bill.

Anyway, I'm still a little edgy and jumpy after this whole ordeal. Bats flying around your seat at 11:45 PM isn't exactly your average everyday happening at office. What I need the most now is some alcohol to steady my nerves. But It's 12:30 AM now, and all the bloody shops are closed. It's an unfair fuckin' world!

Food

Rice, sambar, curd. Rice, sambar, curd. Rice, sambar, curd, rotis, weird gravy. Rice, sambar, curd. Rice, sambar, curd. Rice, rasam, curd, rotis, some other weird-tasting crap. This is how repetitive the lunch menu has become at the cafetaria. And as you've guessed by now, I've got rice, sambar and curd coming out of my ears.

A lot of people I've complained to keep asking me, "Then why don't you go out for lunch everyday?" Like I never thought of it. I would, but then, there are a lot of things that eventually dissuade me from going out for lunch, some of them being:

1. It's hot as hell outside during lunchtime.
2. There's a physical effort involved.
3. All the good restaurants are not within walkable distance.
4. Because of (3), I have to go on bike, which again involves physical effort. I have to kick the bastard for like a million years before it starts.
5. The only people I get for company want to eat at this Malayali joint. I already have Malayali food for dinner, because there's only Bullet Rice (the mallu rice) at home, and the last thing I want to have is Bullet rice in the afternoon. It kinda gets to you after a while. The Bullet rice, I mean.

Worse than the Bullet rice is the coconut-flavored food you get at all these Malayali joints, which the other guys seem to dig a lot. I dunno, but the smell of coconut oil in food kinda reminds me of these nerds, the front-benchers in college who put bucketloads of coconut oil on their hair, the kind who become the honest "Letters to the Editor"type when they grow old. I know I'm crazy, but whenever I taste coconut-flavored food, I always think that they kinda took all these nerds into the restaurant kitchen and kinda wrung their hair dry in the goddam vessel and cooked the food in the oil wrung from their hair. The food's got a weird taste. I'll probably find lice in the food one of these days. Some guys found a cockroach in the food... the guy who had his hair wrung that day must've been one helluva huge giant nerd or something to have cockroaches instead of lice in his hair.

Anyway, I've just about had enough rice-sambar-curd in life. I'll probably get a haemorrhage or something if I have rice-sambar-curd again. These cafetaria guys can really drive you to death when they want to.

Coffee Mugs

I don't believe it! Someone actually stole my coffee mug! And before you ask... no, it isn't of any sentimental value. It's one of those 'company' coffee mugs they give you if you work for one. This one is white in color, has our company's logo on one side, and a cartoon character with a stupid expression on the other side. They actually went around 6 floors, distributing these stupid-looking cups to everyone. Hell, they even asked you to sign on a sheet of paper after you received yours. All rationed and everything. I can imagine the folks who did this spending considerable amount of time designing this thing, planning the number of cups they'll make and all. And when they decide on, say 500, and just when they're about to order the mugs, someone'll say in the last minute, all earnest, concerned, and in a honest tone and all, "Shouldn't we order 100 more? I know we need only 500 now, but just in case, you know." And the others would think about it, and one of them would say "You know.... he's got a point. Let's go with 600!!". I hate it when people get all honest, caring and earnest about things like coffee mugs.

Anyway, I'm glad they didn't ask us to stand in a queue or something to collect our coffee mugs, like those Nazis did when distributing clothes and blankets when Jews arrived in their concentration camps. Of course, I wouldn't have gone to collect my allotted coffee mug, but then, people all around me would've gone, come back with their mugs with a smug, content expression, and would've asked you "Hey... didn't you get yours???" That would've depressed me.

Coming back to the point, someone actually stooped to the level of stealing this coffee mug, of all coffee mugs in the world. I wonder if they took it out of need, very well knowing what an ugly-looking mug it was, or if they took it, thinking it was beautiful and all. Whatever the reason, stealing a goddam ugly-looking coffee mug really is the pits. I wouldn't do it even if someone offered me a million bucks to do it. Even if the coffee mug was good-looking as hell.