Remembering the BIT Canteen

This piece of info is taken from BIT alumni site and was written by Amitabh Mishra Sir :)


Bahut saalon pehle ki baat hai. Tab BIT (aur Bhilai House) ki boundary wall keval 3 ft. oonchi thi. (How convenient, na!). Andar campus mein koi Canteen Shanteen nahin thi. Campus ke theek bahar 2 tapre the - Ek Bhau ka, aur ek thela tha Chachi ka - both located on the extreme ends of the same boundary wall, by the ever dry canal.

Bhau has consistently been in the same business, running profits, catering to the same strata of customers with services that deserve an ISO certificate for consistency. His prime product was tea, but he was also into paan-cigarette. And, by the time we became his customers, he had already diversified into bread-omlette too. BTW, his son is completing his MBA from BIT this year. And still, on occassions, mostly when when all canteens in BIT are closed or when some batchmate of mine visits BIT, I get an opportunity to go nostalgic along with the usual combo of tea-bread-omlette at Bhau's. Ab toh yeh kuchh logon ko aashcharya aur atpata bhi lagta hai ki - "SIR!!! Aur yahaan...!!!!

Par kya karein, once a BITian, always a BITian.

Doosra thela tha Chachi ka, jaisa ki main ne bataya. Sahuji and his wife, our Chachi would come together in the morning. Sahuji would get along with his paan-beedi business and Chachi would make tea. Just TEA. No bread-omlette, nothing else. The tea would be fresh and great, unlike at Bhau's where tea was mostly used as an aid to gulp down the bread-omlette combo. It was the tea, for which we used to visit her. The fact remains that she was christened as "CHACHI" by us, the first batch of BIT.
Somehow we never could bring ourselves to call Sahuji as 'Chacha' and to this date we call him that way only. But, his wife was our Chachi - woh Chachi jiski chai peekar hum log Engineer bane. Today she is no more, but all First generation BITians remember her fondly. May her soul rest in eternal peace. In fact, Sahuji got the contract of BIT canteen soully on the goodwill acquired by Chachi.