I wrote this piece at some point in February 2022. Publishing it today, on June 21, 2026, with minor grammatical edits. Enjoy!
I started watching two food documentaries this week: Street Food Latin America and Street Food Asia. Both series on the beautiful science of food and the feelings it brings are wholesome and inspiring.
I stay away from anything food-related. Not because I don’t like food or cooking, but quite the opposite. I like everything about food a bit too much.
Days in my parents’ home always revolved around cooking and eating. As a little girl, I used to burn pieces of paper in between bricks and boil tea in toy saucers on our terrace. I would drink the tea and also serve it to my mother. When I started living on my own, I spent hours in grocery stores, farmers’ markets, restaurants, street joints, culinary books and blogs, and so on. Many of you may know I have a dormant food blog, and that isn’t my only one. I once walked into an Italian restaurant in Bangalore and joined as a part-time trainee while I had a full-time software job. I was only an airplane ticket away from traveling to Italy to do a culinary course. Once, I spent months planning my restaurant that I never opened.
I didn’t become a professional chef or restaurateur. What I do now is what I have wanted to do with my life. Food remains the focal part of my existence, though. And such an obsession is obviously followed by its hazards.
I ate so much over the years that I gained weight no matter how much I exercised. I was seventy kilos at one point. First, I didn’t realize I was broadening, thickening, and, of course, ageing faster than I should’ve because my cells were busy digesting food and regenerating exponentially to recover from the exertion of digestion (more on healthy living here). I looked at myself in the mirror with only one objective: to prove I was still as thin as I was as a little girl. But I was not (let’s ignore the emotional costs of this thought process for a moment).
When I went to South America about five years ago, I ate fried empanadas, large soup bowls, bread, and cheeses of all kinds. For the first few months, while I fought the Chilean cold, I maintained my weight. But during the last months when I was just traveling, staying in treehouses, and eating yuca and cheese sticks, that was when fat started rounding up around my waist.
After traveling around the continent for three months, I returned to my friend’s house in Santiago. Her sister (who had been obnoxious to me in the past) held down on one of my love handles and said that I had those. Ouch. The woman had no right to say what she said. I was scarred for life. But those were two countryside Chilean women in their 70s and 80s. One of them remains my best friend, though, and is the main protagonist of this memoir of a Diwali I spent with her in her country home in Chile.
So I noticed that I had gained in those leisured and sunlit months of travel. I felt heavy, not unhealthy. I returned to India and joined an aggressive Hatha yoga class. I sweat so much there that when I told my friends, they didn’t believe me. “How can you sweat doing yoga?” Little did they know.
My relationship with food and everything around it turned complex. Or was it always complicated right from my childhood? I will explore more in a separate essay.
I stay away from food shows because if I start watching them, I will spend my entire life with food. I will shop food, I will cook food, I will eat food, I will breathe food, I will talk food, I will love food. I will be stuck, I know.
But food is an essential way to understand the lives of people. So my adventure with food continues while I keep my hunger toned down (not always). You will often find me licking food pans, staring at locals cooking or eating, and picking up the weirdest vegetable from the grocery stall.
In those food shows, I saw otherworldly yet simple dishes that make you wonder how human beings could create so much out of nothing. But the shows did a greater thing. They showed the guts of the people who clutched onto their beliefs in themselves and worked hard and endured. They went on to change how people look at food, not just in their neighborhoods but also in their cities. Their food and their passion for it now ripple through their countries and the world.
I wanted to make something extraordinary, say the more than eighty-year-old Thai street food chef, the Argentinian woman who makes potato tortillas, and many more. This thought is so connected and in sync with how artists, writers, entrepreneurs, urban gardeners, coders, painters, and sculptors think. Everyone who works with love, care, and passion can understand the sentiment here.
We want to create something extraordinary, we all say. We are driven by our desire to show the world the way we see something and also the way we want them to see us.
And if we set our minds on it, we can turn the dream into a reality. We may cook on the street, but we can become the best street chefs of the world, whipping up tom yums and pad thais. We could be the ones running barbecues, though everyone told us only men could grill. We can save our family’s inheritance. We can paint. We can write. We can sing. We can dance. We can research. We can code.
We could love whoever we want. We can create a life of our own, and we can own it all.
Belief, hard work, endurance, and a little bit of craziness are all we need.
And I promise you we will never go hungry!
What do you think we need to be content with our lives?
Food is a great way to express our passions, purpose, and priorities colorfully on a plate. I baked this potato basket years ago and spent hours getting a perfect photo.
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Journeys Beyond and Within...
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In my vivid narrative style (that readers love, ahem), I have told my most incredible adventures, including a nine-month solo trip to South America. In the candid book, the scoldings I got from home for not settling down and the fears and obstacles I faced, along with my career experiments, are laid bare. Witty and introspective, the memoir will make you laugh and inspire you to travel, rediscover home, and leap over the boundaries.
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