Anand’s story:
I am bad at making friends.
I had moved to Hyderabad for college. I was staying in a hostel with people who were already friends with each other. I didn’t know how to get into an already formed circle, making friends became much harder. I was having a horrible time.
One Sunday, my roommate did not want to eat breakfast in the mess. He asked me if I would go out for breakfast with him. We walked around, looking for a place we could eat at. We came across The Chocolate Room. We thought it has ‘chocolate’ in its name, how bad could it be? We went in.
We ordered chocolate pancakes. They took forever to make it. In those 40-45 minutes, my roommate and I talked a lot and became friends. After that, every Sunday we would go to The Chocolate Room to get our required dose of choco-chip pancakes smothered in Chocolate syrup topped with vanilla ice cream and one cherry. Just one.
This one time, another guy, from a neighboring room joined us randomly. He too became a regular. We all became friends. We called ourselves the ‘pancake breakfast club’.
This guy from the other room passed away in an accident. And whenever my roommate and I had pancakes, we thought of him.
Pancakes helped me make friends and cope with losing them.
P’s experience making and eating pancakes:
- Baby r, R and I had our pancakes slathered with Nutella and completely forgot about the whipped cream and cherry till we were halfway done.
- We told dadi about this story as we ate so she decided to eat one too. We have decided to do this more often.
I had struggled to make friends when I was in an engineering college, when nothing worked I got people dadi made food too. It didn’t work. I am going to try again. I’ll use it as a conversation starter next time I am anxious about social interaction.