The mess committee at my PG held a formal vote. Not a casual "what do you guys want" poll, an actual formal vote, with a printed ballot and everything, to settle whether Sunday lunch should be paneer or chicken. Democracy, deployed in full, over the weekend menu.
Paneer won. By two votes. A narrow, decisive, ballot-certified victory.
And the chicken faction has not taken it well. Not gracefully, not quietly, not with the dignity of the defeated. There are grumblings. There are claims of an unrepresentative sample. There is talk of a recount.
What amazes me is the scale of all this. We are twelve people. Twelve. And this paneer-versus-chicken question has become a genuinely contested, ongoing weekly issue, complete with factions and lingering resentment. A building of a dozen people has manufactured a political crisis out of Sunday lunch, and honestly, the drama is more nourishing than either option.