The Unofficial Cafeteria

The best part of college life is you get to spend with your friends. Share experiences, share crushes, share so much with each other. You create memories, embark on adventures together. All your life you always wanted to go to school the way Archie, Betty and Veronica and friends went, not quite the Karan Johar way. You always wanted to learn (yes some of us did go to learn, we call them nerds), but you want to learn wearing the trendiest of clothes. And though we may have academics and careers on our minds (or at least our parents and professors would have want us too), the best memories we made were not in not only those classrooms ( or not always, you got to learn some way), but on those cafeteria benches. Where else would be able to sit and yap not get thrown out for talking. And if your college, like mine, didn’t have one, or a semblance of one, or the one  that existed was priced, the Dosawala bhaiya, the Sandwichwala, Chaiwala Bhaiya, became your unofficial cafeteria.

Now you maybe wondering which damn college did I go to? I so wanted to be a Xaverite but I ended up going to HR (well that’s a story for a different post). So that may bring you to another question, what does HR stand for? No, it’s Human Resource, or Harvard and Radcliffe (as our then Vice Principal would have loved us to believe), or even House of Romance, after all college is the time that brings the genders in close proximity, causing the hormones of youth to speed up its development. Alas the actual name, wasn’t as exciting as we hoped it would, after all the kids in the college always acted like elitist snobs, and so we shall not dwell upon it today.

Now the college didn’t anything that could be called a cafeteria (it didn’t have anything remotely close to a campus), so the dosawala and the sandwichwala filled in for a cafeteria, albeit unofficial capacity. 

So throughout the day you found student at the gate, which literally made them outstanding, enjoying a dosa or sandwich. And guess what, you didn’t have to buy one, catch friend eating one and you could pile on, after all sharing is caring.

These were the best place to hangout. Meet up with your friends, chat for hours  on end, you didn’t always have to buy, or you wouldn’t be chased out. This was the place where everyone hung out, for whatever reason. You weren’t segregated based on your, coolness, popularity, or your nerdiness. Everyone hung out like one big meting pot.

You stood there and made plans, decide on movies you wanted to go for, of course bunking lectures, cause Bunking is our brith right and we  shall do it, and you had the choicest of cinemas to go to. You planned vacations, short trips or even bragged about the things you’ve done.

So you stood there, shared jokes, shared lecture notes (you had to do that sometimes), shared agonies, waited for your favourite eye candy to show up, and like clockwork they always showed up on time.

And since you were at the gate you knew which professors at come. It was the best place to hangout with your posse, group, your tribe, your significant other and their friends, and even checkout the eye candies of the college.

In the end a major part of the students, if not all of them, could always be found at the gate, unless you wanted to improve your attendance, and avoid being on the Blacklist (thr literal list and not the show). So when the municipal came around to demolish our own unofficial cafeteria, the Vice Principal, now the Principal, move them into the college premises (whatever could be spared), finally making them the official cafeteria of the college.