To Cook or Not To??

After a long gap of 3 months i am back at putting my view on the life at US. Now for every new guy who lands without any prior experience of that basic survial stuff known as "cooking" life suddenly becomes pretty hard and funny. Hard because all of a sudden you cannot relax and enjoy your life on your mom's cooking. Funny because you get your apprenticeship under the
guys who sometimes would have come only 5-6 months before you. Now i remember the first time i tried to cook it was harder than any courses i had done till now(For all my friends laughing there i ask them to try it out and then you will realise what i am talking about). Now my room mates told me "hey its not difficult to learn basic of cooking we will teach you in 20 minutes" i guess they never realised that how difficult is it to teach a guy who has no idea how rasam powder looks or sambar looks. The first time i cooked the my roommates realised what a duanting task they had ahead of them. The expression they gave was of pure horror like they had been given a cup of hemlock(poison) or something. For all you guys who are learning to cook like me, I can give you one advice,look at the faces of your room mates. Its a pretty much accurate description of your cooking.Whenever you start cooking you will see your roommates going through various stages based on your cooking expertise. The usual stages are "1.Shock, 2. Dread 3. Resigned Acceptance 4. Appreciation" mostly in that order(mind you its not easy to get to the 4 stage,however eventually you will get there if for no other reason but practice makes a man perfect and the fact that your stomach is on the line.). Now the first thing you have to do is to learn a couple of dishes really well. No i am not saying it because i feel for your roomates. I am saying it so that if you are living alone you can survive on your cooking. Once you get a hang of things you can start experimenting(Guys when i mean experiments please try be a bit moderate as the end products will end up in your stomach.) Now in my case after 4 months of hard work and persevarance(for all you guys who know me,read it as trial and errors) i am at a stage where i can say safely that i can survive on my cooking. But i guess its a vicious cycle for soon it will be my turn to go through these stages as a new bunch of guys will come for fall semester.

I guess for an MS student its one of those institutions where every new guy gets to shatter the idealic existence of the older roomates through that ancient art "COOKING or something like that".