Me and My Society - Part 2

(continue from the last post.. Me and My Society - part 1)

So, where were we..

we were talking about society and its bad-good stuff. Role and responsibility at this level are like diving in sea to check its depth. Before diving, some take a long breath and some don't even blink. But inside this sea, everyone experiences the same energy and colorful life which one cannot even imagine while standing at the seaside. Anyway, by all this, I don't want to say I have been there, at the sea bottom. But such experiences give us a hint of what it could be out there.

In college, I initially had nightmares, I never knew one need to be shrewd to come up scratch-less through those ragging days. I was among those for whom it was the struggle of life. It was like "What the hell going on ?". It was somewhat like adversity on us. But this adversity compelled us to stay together and really know what we all are. This is some phenomenon which gave me some lessons. This could be one good chapter of Human Management. 

If the majority have common fear then they have a common goal. 

They will be together and will bound to understand each other at least for time adversity is there. This was the lesson I learned once ragging at our college completed. Why I said learned it on completion of ragging. Because it was evident, cohesion was not there once there was no common fear.

While in the hostel I got lots of opportunities to gain an understanding of people's behavior. At the very beginning, I got the chance to manage my hostel's mess. It was one heck of a task to do. I can proudly say I managed it very well. Before taking over this task I already had to spend a couple of months and had a good idea of problems and the way mess is already been managed.

Any kind of public system never contains an objective of how to run that system. It just highlights what kind of services need to fulfill for the public. It never talks about the quality of services, and this gives a lot of scopes to fulfill objectives with varied kinds of quality assurance, depending upon the group of people running the post.

When I took over the charge I knew the system of mess was grossly mismanaged. Various issues which I observed were:

• The mess worker including their manager was working with no accountability and were highly corrupted.
• The supply chain for ration, milk, vegetables, and other stuff was corrupted and causing great financial and health loss to residents of the hostel.
• The warden uses to take advantage of Canteen-Incharge's limited understanding of financial intricacies and "how to run mess for a month". Canteen-Incharge is the student himself and in most cases novice.
• No complaint-addressing system was in place to bring various above-mentioned problems in limelight and thus no change basically seen.

All the above-mentioned problems were known to all. By all means the sufferer and the one who could make the change. But for the change needed consistent effort and that too with cost, as the change-maker has to take out extra time and in some case put his reputation at stake.

So, when I become Canteen-Incharge, I made effort to identify the right people to look after various kinds of stuff while running such posts. As I cannot manage everything by myself and was not even having the qualities of know-how to do. But I made some understanding of know-what to do.

So, to start with I took help from residents-friends. The very basic thing I need to manage, I was not having any clue about its quality and how it is done. I am talking about the quality of ration and vegetables. So, I brought two people to my team. One was my friend and batch-mate Amit Patel, who belongs to a rural area and had a good sense of understanding of the quality of rations. The other was from a different group. I intentionally tried to keep my team diversified, to win the confidence of the very people for whom I was running this post.

The second person whom I picked was the routine security guard of our hostel, who too belongs to the rural area and had a good idea of shopping areas for ration in the city. The person was honest and simple in nature. He leads us when we went to buy ration in bulk. Among boys i.e. us he was the only middle-aged man who made our group looked like a serious bunch of guys. On the first day, I got 30,000/- to run the mess. I took my team and bought ration, it was fun. We had a field day, I tipped the guard for making our outing successful.

Then come controlling and accountable allotment of ration to mess-workers. Here I hand over the task to the student who lives next to the ration room and asked him to share his responsibility with another resident so that it is convenient for them to run this untimely job.

Then come milkman, this was a tricky situation. As for how one can control and check the quality of milk on a daily basis as milkman delivers the product at odd times. And starting with the job, I come to know that milkman was the uncle of previous Canteen-Incharge. This means their duo must have made good bucks through low-quality milk that milkman used to deliver. So, I decided instead of Milkman delivering the milk let have Packed Milk, where at least the quality of milk be assured even though it will cost extra over students' pocket. Here I preferred health over finance. This step did help me in making some foes.

I had already made local ration-shop owner unhappy by choosing to brought ration from the main city than from his shop. I still remember, on the announcement of my selection as Canteen-Incharge, two ration-shop owners came to my room and tried to make me understand what's personally good for me. Anyway, all this process was day by day consuming me like person starts to get out-flow by river, which he initially thinks like simple river-bath.

The biggest and proud step I took was stopping the buying of vegetables from the local market. This was honestly the biggest gain I made which was impacting students' health and pocket. This was something no one could imagine and could not understand unless goes behind the doors. The vegetables which that local shop use to supply was of very bad quality. He uses to share profits with mess-manager by pricing it very high.

Here I investigated and found that luckily nearby to our hostel there is Vegetable Market where local vendors use to buy vegetable at a very low price and one has better option to get fresh vegetables out there. But there was one hiccup in buying vegetables from that place. That "mandi" Veg Market took place for only two hours and start in at early morning at 5 am. And with each minute delay, you will get less fresh and costly vegetables out there.

Now, here comes sacrifices and going against your personal habits and interests. Person like me who never woke before 8 am, decided to woke early at 5 am and took one of mess-worker to buy vegetable from that place. This step really caused great savings to cost of running the mess. For this I somehow convinced few of my friends to rotate this responsibility and in return favor I had them have bananas(cheap fruits) free of cost in breakfast. Since this team was working without any recognition, I also arranged glass of hot milk after dinner. This was negative side of my way of running the public post.

This activity saved me huge some of the money for students. But this was one of the steps which lead to my downfall from the post. You can say one of the reasons. By stop buying vegetables from the local vendors I caused the stoppage of free delivery of vegetables at my Warden's house. The other reason was my disallowance of one Ph.D. student's free mess, that Ph.D. student was having a free meal due to the approval of Warden. Now, this was like a one-on-one challenge I made to Warden's authority.

While taking all these steps I was having many kinds of fears, didn't really knew what will be the impact of all this on my personal interest. As I told you it was like going with the flow, so fears were there but not much time was there to sit and think what could be done for all these fears I was carrying. One thing I can say with experience that most of our fears are genuine but some fears which we carry due to being individual don't belong to you when you run such a post. As you become representative of people, and with that, you get power and security of belonging which secure you from those being-individual-kind-of-fears.

At some places, I have to take steps to show my authority against people whom I was commanding. Like once, one of the mess-worker dis-respected my order and made some casual remarks over my authority. I immediately fired him from the place, which later gave me respect among mess-worker, as thereafter they took me seriously. It was another thing I re-instantiated that person on his work, once he apologized for his actions. That alone action I took gave me a sense of power while running that post else it was like some puzzle I was solving, seeing the mes that mess-system was in.

This all took around a week to make my mess work in some respectable and accountable way. After a roller-coaster start, I got to settle down with this role. Then come to some free-bees and giving a personal touch to the system. I tried to introduce some of my favorite dishes in the menu item. Once on Sunday morning, I asked the mess-worker to make Allo-Parathas(Potato-stuffed bread) for breakfast. You know this was one heck of a funny thing which I experienced.

 

You will be astonished to know, sometimes things which people like causes more harm than good. That breakfast turns into brunch. Being Sunday, people carried on breakfast till 12'o clock in the noon and it causes hand-ache to mess-worker who got tired serving parathas to students and later none of them turned to have lunch. This causes me to immediately remove this item from the menu. Actually, our mess never had or experienced such an awesome dish. I thought let me run simple mess rather than extravagant.

Since I was saving a lot in my mess, I tried to popularize my stay by having a cold drink before the festive break on which people were about to go. I knew half of the residents have left for their home way earlier than college break and the hostel was half empty. So, I thought why not weekly sweat-dish be replaced with cold drinks which were twice costly but were not causing any extra-bucks to me as students were half in number. I used this to popularize my candidature for next month's running the same post.

Other financial impacting steps I took were like:

• Need approval of warden to get concession in mess-charges if one takes leave only for more than three days. Now people who go for 1 or 2 days breaks didn't get concession and didn't mind the rule too.
• I break mess charges into two parts: One part constitutes non-edible costs like coal, gas, mess workers pay, and another such cost which is almost fixed for each month. I did so that students who take concession would still have to pay this part of the cost even though they didn't stay in the hostel for a single day. And Second part constitutes the edible part which was calculated on per-day-per-resident. And based on the number of days each and every student stayed in the hostel and had a mess, were charged accordingly. Now you will say how such complex accounts I maintained, for that too I took help from my friends who were good in all this stuff and they enjoyed it too.

With all this, there were some situations that caught me and caused me to suffer: All this stuff hampered my studies for which I was somewhat ready to accept and was having an idea about. But I suffered financially too, not being good in accounts, I somehow foolishly involved my money in expenditure for the mess. Now, this was a hell of a lot of activity for me to resolve. I didn't have clue how to calculate out how much money I spend which Warden gave me and that of mine. Even though everything was in account books I maintained but I didn't have clued how to calculate. This made me realize "Managing money is not everyone's cup of tea"; and especially not my cup of tea. Here again, come to my friends(especially Rohit Mangal) to rescue me from this bad ending which was a satisfying experience.

At the end of all this, people were very pleased with my services and the way I ran the mess. But since I was not popular among warden and mess-manager I didn't get the second chance to be on this post.

And by any standard and factor, the mess was most efficiently and effectively ran under me. This experience enriched me a lot in many sense. Some pointed fingers at me for being corrupt and many other things. But somehow my approach helped me to come out from this with no blots over my image. And for your knowledge, this post fetched many Canteen-Incharge thousands of bucks, where I was almost about to lose few of my own. But due to the support of my friends and my integrity I pulled off one of the greatest public services I ever did so far..