MISA Länderabend 2020

Food has always been more than sustenance for us humans. Food is an emotion which we share with each other. Food satisfies our soul. Even 300,000 years before, when we were far far away from all the complexities and technicalities of life in today’s time, people gathered around to eat together, as was confirmed by evidence found in Quesem Cave near Tel Aviv. All the major events in a normal human life are celebrated through food, all around the world. You cut a cake on your birthday, organize a feast when you get married and in some cultures, your family organizes a spectacular feast when you die.In other words, food connects us all, beyond race, beyond nationality, beyond even species.

Sharing food is one of the purest gestures of cordiality towards your fellow beings. It develops trust, it develops an understanding. When you share your food with someone, you also share your culture, the experience of thousands of years of cultural development accumulated on a plate. There are millions and millions of dishes or kinds of food in the world, but each one of them is unique, it is special, because it has a unique thought behind it, it has a unique history. The dish in your plate is not just the work of someone who has cooked it for you, it is the concentrated result of experiments, trials, errors, improvement, over thousands or hundreds of years. Today, Globalization has made the world smaller and sharing easier, maybe discovering that we all possess the same love for Food around the globe will help us in making a peaceful tomorrow, where everyone can coexist.

Länderabend event

With this thought in mind and our primary aim of cultural integration with German culture, we were very excited when we found out about the Länderabend event, organised by TUM International, it was an opportunity to share our culture and food with the students of TUM and residents of Munich. We wanted this to be the best Länderabend and we wanted to give our best, hence preparations started well in advance. This being the first major event for us, we were still learning the ropes of how to function as an association and meeting and coordinating with some really awesome and motivated people, who would later form the MISA team, it was a huge learning experience. From deciding the menu, to budgeting and buying the ingredients each step was a struggle and fun at the same time.

After around a week of planning, constant phone calls, stress and lots of rejections, we finalized the menu, places to cook, and arranged the utensils (there was a lot of borrowing and begging involved), we were ready! The actual cooking took around two days and we discovered that we have some professional chefs amongst ourselves, hiding in disguise of students. Special mention to Abhinay and Parul for their immense efforts and supervision for making the Non veg and Veg main course. After 48 hours, we were ready to give Munich a taste of our cuisine, of our culture and to satisfy its hunger.

The event was a huge success, more than 200 people were served, and everyone liked it so much that within 25 mins we ran out of cooked rice and people lined up for more than 20 mins to get another serving. It was a great experience watching the happy faces of people from all around the world, talking and bonding over a plate of indian food, which you made for them. It satisfies your soul. It was surreal, to be in a foreign land, to be able to serve so many people the food of your land, and to see them enjoy it.

Menu

Vegetarian Main Course - Dum Aloo (Prepared by Parul, Harshita, Tushar, Shubankar)
Non Vegetarian Main Course - Butter Chicken Masala (Prepared by Abhinay, Arpit, Sid)
Side dish - Jeera Rice (Prepared by Tushar, Ganesh, Nandan)
Sweet Dish - Coconut Barfi (Prepared by Arpita, Mahesh Bhat, Prasanth)

MISA is committed to promotion of such events and practices. In the future, we hope to be part of more such events.

This article is published with the permission of the author(s). The author(s) hold the copyrights and reproduction of this article without their permission is prohibited.