2 minutes to midnight.......... maggiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

To the hallowed portals of mansion of gods (men’s hostel, cmc), entered a motley crue on 9/11(we can never celebrate our class anniversary in USA) to start a career in allopathy.

That heralded a wave of ritualistic behavior in my seniors who embarked on an ego slaying mode, which made us feel like vermin. It went on for three days with much fanfare and whatever.

One new task we were assigned to, as we were dissecting formalin soaked cadavers, taking graphs with frog legs and mugging amino acids’ configuration. The task to serve, sticking to our cmc motto (Not to be ministered unto, but to minister), our seniors.

To serve the aromatic maggi (noodles) with the stock, just enough to let the noodles to slither against each other.

We would reach the seniors’ rooms around the midnight time (afta buyin the maggi packets at our stores) and start off with cleaning yesterday’s grit stuck on the hot plate and search the rumble in the fellas room for the saucepan.

My first day in cooking maggi was a catastrophe, me followed the instructions on the darned packet but sort of over cooked it and it become cream of maggi soup with very few noodles retaining its morphology- some sorta chyme. One bad thing is if there is any goof up, we ought to eat it. Me had that privilege few times, but pulled my classmate for help- my ever omnivorous friend anoop – maggi in any form goes into his thoppai(tummy).

Some seniors were bored and we ought dole a entertaining piece to accompany their slurpings of our cookin masterpieces. Me knew few GNR numbers and easiest to sing was, the knock, knock on heaven’s door and my cacophony was accompanied with guitars and drums, played vocally by fartogenic friend of mine. Few tamil numbers were dished out too and one telugu song sung by my east godavari resident evil pal – one nagarjuna song and least we could do is to shout the chorus - jagada jagada jaa..

One senior wanted maggi to be floating like weeds on the steaming murky waters. We knew seniors rather by their tongues. One very enterprising fella in my class, one day got some shelled peas, diced carrots n beans from our mess and he had the privelge of gulping down maggi with tender lovin gazes from our seniors.

In the summer hols at my home, wanting to impress my mom of my culinary skills, offered to cook maggi for all of them and alas – the history repeated itself – because the gas stove cooked the maggi must faster than the hotplate and it needed just 30 seconds and this time the maggi got carbonized too. Grrrrrrrrrr. Happily, some dosa flour in the fridge nullified my gastric juices that day.

Hope atleast when I cook for my wife – I will perfect maggi and get a peck or two. The Gift of the Mag(g)i. ;)))