Food Taster...

In my two years stint as a Masters student at IIT KGP, I learned and unlearned many things. One of the things that I unlearned or rather had to unlearn was to being selective about taste of the foods. The exotic, tasty, super-hygienic food at kgp made sure that even 2 years after leaving kgp I still consider anything edible as good food; only something stale or something horribly gong wrong can be recognized as bad food. When I eat something very tasty or home food I feel like I am in heaven. Being put up in the new hostel at kgp, consisting of new cooks, the food I ate was even more outstanding. It was the place where I realized that even something as simple as omelette can be made uneatable. Sometimes, we used to get dosas for breakfast, and horrible would be a softer word for them; when we complained our mess manager he used to say that cook is new and he would learn. Wow!, that was a revelation; a cook selected through rigorous central government procedures and doesn't know how to cook. My mess manager probably could write a book about 'how not to get a good cook'; its just unimaginable that in place like kharagpur which has much more than significant population of telugu people you can not get a cook who can make eatable dosas.
This was in IIT, the other hotels etc, were a different story at all, except on dhaba inside IIT and one far away at a place called 'gol market', there was hardly any hotel where we didn't taste stale food once and fought with the people there. The dhaba inside IIT was good, that was the only place where one can get descent tasty food in IIT, so it had other problems, sometimes we had to wait for an hour or so for food to arrive. The 'Dal tarka' we used to get there, I am still to get that good 'dal tarka' anywhere. Thee other dhaba was damn good especially for non-veg people.
I can go on and on this topic, especially how quality of food in our hostels were ensured by a central facility, etc. etc.