We had a wonderful infrastructure in our college. IIITM Gwalior is one of the premiere institutes in India and had only one branch at our time – Information Technology. The hostel was compulsory for each student. Even localities had to take hostel room. But one of the major unique things you will find in IIITM is Single room, with Wi-Fi/Lan both, AC and Cooler. No other institute provides this kind of facility in the world.
But we made the list little bit longer. We added own mess. Yes, in hostel we made our own Mess. Check pictures below. People use to have their own heater, they used to cook Maggie or sometimes chicken or panner. But we few people made our own mess and we used to cook daily.
*** Kind Note : The preview picture may look like that we had standard (5 star) mess in our Hostel. But please don’t get confused. It might be there in Girl’s hostel but in Boys’ hostel the condition was miserable. The only similarity between real mess and this image is the design of plate. We also used to get similar plates and nothing else. If you smell our mess’s plates & glass you would get ‘Nirma ki Khushbu’. So don’t get excited after seeing the preview. I just took it for reference.

Let’s talk about our own mess.
Our Menu:
1. Dal Fry
2. Aalu ki Sabji
3. Rice Fry
4. Fried Maggie (No normal Maggie)
5. Milk, Tea & Coffee
6. Khir (Aalu)
7. Khir (sawai)
8. Bhel Puri
9. Khichdi
10. Aalu Parathas (The Best) and many more.

In our group we had 7-8 people – Hemant Gard, Ramesh Chandora, Bharat Swami, Harkesh Meena, Manoj Singh, Prashant Kumbhare and Me (Deepesh Singh). Each one has expertise in one filed except Swami. He only knows to make Tea (Jyada Chini ke sath) & normal Maggie (wo bhi Aalu bhujiya ke sath). Kumbhare was the best for cutting onion, Hemant was our major chef. Harkesh for cutting vegetables & parathas and Ramesh for cooking khir and paratha belne ke liye. And me for making masala for Paratha.
So we had a team and each one has his own responsibility. I still miss those days and we had a dedicated mess. Actually we had a vacant room on 3rd floor. We made it Kitchen and kept everything like Aata, Oil, Vegetable, Knife everything. You name it we had it.
The most common dish was Dal fry. We used to have it daily with Harkesh’s ghee. The tasty food helped everyone (except Swami) to increase weight. We used to weigh weekly and used to checked improvement. I gained 2-3 kg in just 2 months.
Now the question is where we used to get the ingredient from. Hahaha, simple from our mess only. Yes, we used to bring everything from our mess. One thing I want to say we would never find such kind mess. They never said no for anything. We used to bring oil, vegetables (aalo, tamatar, gobi, pyaj etc) and used to cook ourselves.
We never bothered about flavor. All we know that we used to cook tasty food and we all especially I will miss everything forever.
Now I am in Pune and always miss Hostel Mess. Here I am having food at 2 PM which is cooked at 8 AM. From last 5 months, I never had hot & fresh lunch. Don’t talk about quality. But very soon will shift to Bangalore and I hope will have own kitchen.

Signature

Deepesh Singh