The Mess Hall

June 9, 2010

Here in Jamshedpur, we don’t have very many commercial plazas or restaurants to go to that are within walking distance. In fact, there aren’t any real food establishments outside our Tata quarters for kilometers. We have to travel by rickshaw to get to the nearest full market (meaning one with at least one reputable café or restaurant or retail outlet) which is at least 20 minutes away in the humid heat on unmarked streets, so we usually just don’t venture out. Instead, our group takes part in the meal plan we’ve been given.

So it’s just like we’re back at college, living in a large dormitory with a pre-purchased meal plan. The only difference is that with this meal plan, each meal that is served is pre-planned (so that you only have 2 choices) and set at company-dictated times. Breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner are all scheduled by Tata, so we have 2.5 hour windows in which we can avail of the dish(es) that are available for a meal…however, we don’t really get to choose what we want to eat from the menu; instead, we serve ourselves from the giant bowls that they place in front of us at the tables.

This isn’t a bad thing considering the fact that we get a pretty assorted menu of meals throughout the week – however, most of the foods we eat consist of a combination of rice, potatoes, chapatti (or roti), and dal (lentils which can be cooked a zillion different ways). And sometimes these 4 things are the only things served for dinner. There aren’t very many vegetables included, hardly anything fresh, there’s lots of fried snacks, and I think I’ve only seen one fruit – mango made into a chutney – since getting here over a week ago. The dishes are pretty tasty once you get used to the spices, but my low-carb, weight loss diet is now somewhat out the window.

It’s customary to eat with your hands here. However, you really only eat with your right hand, as your left hand is considered dirty. So to “blend in” as much as we can, our group of women clad in colorful American clothing, in a mess hall of usually 30+ men uniformed in blue Tata attire, eat with our right hands. It’s a pretty funny sight to see…four foreign ladies in a mess hall of mostly men; men who have (thus far) been too shy (or disinterested) to talk to us. So at every meal, we talk amongst ourselves. We’re like the random roadblock that gets in the way of worker ants, so they just carry on by going around us, not noticing that the roadblock is even there – although one ant gets curious from time to time and crawls over. But then he learns that we aren’t as interesting as he thought, so he folds back into the flow.

We have made a few women friends here in the hostel through the mess hall though, so it’s been an interestingly central part of our experience so far. We’ve learned that although pretty much everyone in this hall is single, both genders hardly interact with each other because it just isn’t the norm or custom here. [No wonder they aren't allowed to televise kissing.]