Unhygienix

My stomach has gone through such torture all my life that I am sure it has already reached its half-life by now. I think it's a little radioactive too by now :D I have trained my stomach to digest a lot of stuff, including a variety of meat and vegetables. Not to forget adulterated oil and crappy vanaspati ghee. The torture mainly began in college followed by my stint at Baroda.

College food was a culinary disaster and the hygiene was something we tried our best not to investigate. There were basically 2 tastes. Taste of the dal and taste of the rest. What I mean is apart from the dal everything tasted the same. Whether it was chicken, fish or brinjal, they all tasted exactly the same. And we occasionally found  insects in the food but seriously speaking, they are after all bio-degradable. If we saw it, we just took it out and continued eating. Never really bothered us much.

Baroda was another story. Attempted a tiffin service, but soon realized that I was flushing down the food more often than initially planned. And then I just started eating out (after attempting to cook on my own). The problem with cooking is that though it was the healthiest alternative and my cooking was not life-threatening, but the effort was too much and I really don't like cooking. I am more of the eating type :D Appreciate good food and good cooks. Eating out in a vegetarian state basically means that I ended up eating Paneer most of the days and by the end of my stay there, I am sure I had developed a layer of oil in my stomach.

I do face stomach problems once in a while but I have this crazy idea that I can survive any food, with absolutely no issues with the level of hygiene. I wanted to test it again today and so went to this seriously sidey joint at powai. It is sort of a galla where one can get teas and snacks. The idea was to get a samosa-pav. I have eaten there before, but today I decided, I would check out hte hygiene level of the place.

First thing I noticed was that covering food was a myth to them and everything was basically kept in the open. Did I mention that this shop is on the newly built Powai freeway facing the road? By the time I had ifnish deciding what I wanted I realized that my table was still not cleaned. Now, if you have eaten in roadside dhabas, you must be aware of how water is served. They use the finger-dip process, ie they carry around 5 glasses held in such a way that their finger tips are just touching the water surface. I decided to opt out of drinking water there. I also realized that they were using the same cloth for drying their hands and the plates. And I did catch them wiping the serving area with the same cloth too. My heart had started palpitating but I had decided that I would not let it faze me. The dude then cleaned his hand with the cloth mentioned above and grabbed a pav and samosa. Put some extremely questionable chutney on it and served. I wanted to run away but I was on a mission. I somehow managed to eat it and got myself a bottled milk to wash it down.

Fortunately, I am still alive to post this incident and my stomach hasn't picketed against my experimentation. I am not sure if I'll go there again but it felt good to realize that I can still stomach extremely unhygienic food which basically means throw me any place and I will not go hungry :D