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Top 10 Table Manners
1. Chew with your mouth closed.
2. Avoid slurping, smacking, and blowing your nose.
3. Don’t use your utensils like a shovel or as if you’ve just stabbed the food you’re about to eat.
4. Don’t pick your teeth at the table.
5. Remember to use your napkin at all times.
6. Wait until you’re done chewing to sip or swallow a drink. (The exception is if you’re choking.)
7. Cut only one piece of food at a time.
8. Avoid slouching and don’t place your elbows on the table while
eating (though it is okay to prop your elbows on the table while
conversing between courses.)
9. Instead of reaching across the table for something, ask for it to be passed to you.
10. Always say ‘excuse me’ whenever you leave the table.
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I joined the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP in 1967 and left it in 1974 after a hilarious 7 years stay there.
At its peak the said hostel used to house all of thirty weird professors and between us we broke each and every one of Emily Post's Top Ten rules listed above...as broke as the Ten Commandments that the good Lord revealed to Moses.
In truth our Faculty Hostel was not meant to be a hostel at all...it was built as a lavish guest house for foreign visitors and Indian dignitaries. IIT KGP was assisted in its birth pangs by UNESCO and teams of foreign advisers used to visit it during its first decade of inception. So it was a swell affair. It had three two-storied wings E, C, W, each with 16 rooms. They were connected by covered corridors and staircases. Each room had teak furniture...a huge cot with what were then called Dunlop mattresses, a table with a cushioned chair, a sofa chair, a center table, and a mosquito net on order. It had its own attached bathroom with a western toilet (a hyperbole for a commode) and a shower with a towel on its railing. And an exclusive balcony looking into the garden-lawn. The lawn had a big circular green patch with three wrought-iron lawn benches 120 degrees apart so that none of their occupants need face the others if they didn't feel like it, and can immerse themselves undisturbed in their woolgathering. I was a permanent resident on these lawn benches in the evenings, smoking like a chimney.
On the Southern side of the lawn were half a dozen suites called 1BHK apartments in the Hyderabadi lingo. One of these was occupied by our Manager, Rajan, oozing courtesy but not managerial skills...he was too much of a gentleman to start with.
None of us knew how to pronounce a 'suite' so we were at liberty to refer to them as soots or sootays or sweeties. It didn't seem to matter at all. These suites were for visiting families and we bachelors were happy enough to ogle at their contents...a rose is a rose by any other name, shoot or sweet or soot.
And there was this vast dining-cum-drawing room with a sink and a towel-railing welcoming us in. There were half a dozen dining tables with chairs facing each other occupant...courtesy demanded that no one was left to sit without making small talk. These tables were covered with snow-white linen on which were spread snow-white pieces of eminently breakable porcelain crockery and shining stainless steel cutlery. And the dining table was presided by three bearers, Laxman, Narayan and Niranjan clad in snow-white liveries, with snow-white turbans. The adjoining kitchen was officiated by two liveried cooks, Rasik-da and Naik-da with training in western-style cooking...puddings, desserts and the like.
And the drawing-space had three heavily cushioned sofas with their dedicated center tables with newspapers and magazines sprawling on them. And porcelain ash trays.
All this splendor was before this guest house for foreigners was turned into a Faculty Hostel by 1967 when I was an early entrant there. The fall from grace from a dignified guest house to a rowdy faculty hostel had an eminent reason...within a decade of its birth, foreigner visitors became scarce since IIT KGP started standing on its own feet like a lambkin delivered on the ground by its mom and found its feet. And so the occupancy dwindled to a trickle and it became a redundant and over-staffed white elephant. But there was no way permanent employees can be thrown out in a government setup. Meanwhile the intake number of young bachelor faculty increased by leaps and bounds and there were not enough staff Qrs to house them. So what the patient wanted happened to coincide with what the doctor ordered...the thing became an open house by and by.
And the culture of the place got Indianized year by year. Rajan, the smooth-talking Manager took to shouting at one and all, the bearers started talking in bawdy Hindi, their liveries turned yellow bit by bit like of the residents of Feynman's Jadwin Hall at Princeton, the cooks stopped making bread puddings and started frying pomfret and hilsa fish in mustard oil soaked in haldi, the sweepers, Chinta and Montu, stopped cleaning rooms, the office clerk, Datta-Babu, started lending his Remington typewriter overnight to beginners like me, water in the closets stopped running, and the place became very user-friendly and lively like any other hostel and ceased to be a frightening and forbidding guest house.
The internet link is threatening to snap here...there is a summer storm brewing and so I have to stop here unwillingly, and resume tomorrow...
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