Demessifying' The Indian Mess

By Soumitra Subinaya 1
Indian residential colleges/universities provide food to the hostel students in the mess system.
Many such universities of national character, including institutes of law, technology,
management, so on, have messes that run on rent-seeking, free-riding and collective/singular
dictatorial coercion demanding sacrifice of individual liberty. Let us demystify the institutional
format of these messes: if you are admitted to an Indian residential college/university,
subscribing to the mess is mandatory. The mess is run either by the university or a university
contracted food caterer. The university or the mess food caterer takes the same amount of money
as fees from each student, whether you eat. What you get for food is not your choice: either the
university officers decide or a committee consisting of some elected or selected students decides.
If you elected them, they say in their selection of food, rests your choice, that is, in obeying
them, you are obeying yourself. If they are selected by the university office, they say that the
university is acting in your best interests, that is, the interest of the ultimate decision-making
university officer, the dictator in whose choice rests your best interests or choice, lest you want
to invite penalty by your peaceful yet different choice.
The student who first saw the university as protecting her individual liberty by means of
retaliatory use of force only against those who initiate its use to upset individual liberty, realizes
that, with no objective student-university contract in the first place, s/he has been robbed of her
understanding of "Equality of authority" with the head of the university, and been coerced into an
organization headed by a dictator who commands her subordination. Hence, she is coerced into
a system in which you must eat what 'you have chosen' or 'eat in your best interests' or starve
without protest or buy food from shops but compulsorily pay, that is, in the fear of the force
bearing collective/singular dictatorship which also rears the rent-seeking crony capitalist food
caterer running business hands in glove with the university officers from the bottom to the topmost decision-making posts, the student committee post bearers, the student goons : all of whom
the caterers bribe to ensure they see 'profit' in running this corrupt enterprise, an artificially
distorted market. Who suffers as a result? The innocent mess-fees paying individual. What does
that innocent individual get? She gets restrictions on the quality, quantity and variety of food she
can consume, even if she had the willingness to pay more or pay less. That includes a situation
wherein even if she did not want to eat a food item, she did not have the choice not to pay for it.
The solution? The solution is to demessify universities.
Firstly, demissfy your minds. There is an institution that the Indian psyche runs on: the institution
of caste, a system of collective coercion. This system has input a false idea of inequality in the
Indian mind. The Indian mind fails to understand equality in terms of Equality of authority:
Equality of the student with university head in terms of her right to direct her own peaceful
living, equality in the terms of the commoner being no less a human being in directing her own
1

The author is a FEE 100 Alum, internationally award-winning essayist and Lawyer in India.

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peaceful living, than the king. In India, though in many cases, the Law guarantees this equality of
authority on the paper, but the Indian psyche that runs on the institution of caste performs
contracts with the understanding of master-slave relationships. Hence, every Indian student
before joining a university must eliminate caste from her mind by meditating on the correct
understanding of equality as including "The equality of authority" of one with the other.
Secondly, with the aforementioned understanding of equality, students and universities must
negotiate objective student-university contracts that lets universities focus on providing
education in an environment where the mind is without fear of losing the individual right to life,
liberty and property.
Thirdly, let universities be mess-free. Let there be no system of such messes. Let the student
purchase food from anywhere she likes. Let the student purchase their food.

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