Table Talk with Kishi Arora

Table Talk with Kishi Arora
Date: November 28, 2021
Time: 21:00 IST

You would think having a pal who is a pastry chef — qualified from the Culinary Institute of America no less — would be a really useful thing, right? But for over a decade now, Kishi has been sending me photographs of cake for my birthday. Would you think someone with as angelic a face could be so cruel?

Seriously though, I’m a long-time fan of hers. I first met Kishi when she was among a group of TED India Fellows I knew, and as is the way of this world, most of our subsequent friendship has been over social media, with that combination of distance and affection that so many of us know. Kishi’s a highly qualified chef, as I said, who worked in the USA and Singapore before coming back to India, where she has been a consultant for brands like Mad Over Donuts and Nature’s Basket, and Godfrey Philips India. She is also an entrepreneur, with her company Foodaholics which currently has her own line of custom-made desserts and her mother’s home-cooked meals business, Mama K Treats.

We will talk about her culinary journey and influences, as we usually do at Table Talk, before we learn what the crucial differences are between being an accomplished home cook and being a chef planning and executing menus for a changing cast of consumers, and the even more different demands and learnings of being a culinary entrepreneur. As ever, be prepared for digressions — these are conversations, not formal interviews — and you’re welcome to nudge us into them or back on topic.

We’ll chat for at least a couple of hours, including questions from and discussion with the audience, and may go on longer (three hours has been fairly routine for Table Talk, and we’ve gone as long as five).

Giving back

Table Talk will stay free to attend and free to listen to or watch later, for as long as I can afford to keep it that way. But we would like to use our privilege to help others, so we’re asking our guests to choose a cause.

Kishi’s choice is Aid India, which works with marginalised communities, helping them become self-reliant by providing support for education, healthcare and shelter. You can donate to their work here.

Attending

You will need to go to the Zoom link and register with a valid email address, after which you will get the link to join the event.

To get notifications of new episodes and links to past episodes, please subscribe to:
- this Google Group: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ttandfps
- and / or this Telegram Channel: https://t.me/TTandFPS

(About Table Talk and past guests.)

Table Talk with Vidya Balachander

Table Talk with Vidya Balachander
Date: November 14, 2021
Time: 21:00 IST

I first encountered Vidya’s byline in this lovely piece on asafoetida (which won ASJA’s award for food and drink writing in 2021), and have followed her work since. She is an award-winning food writer, and currently editor of Whetstone’s South Asia vertical. Having lived in various parts of India, Sri Lanka, and now Dubai, and with her deep interest in the intersection of food and anthropology, she struck me as the perfect person to chat with and learn about how food wanders around the globe, changing and being changed by those who consume it.

We will also talk about her life and where she has lived it, the influences in her thinking about food, what good food writing is all about, and perhaps what an editor looks for in this kind of writing. Be prepared for digressions; as ̛I’ve said from the beginning, off-topic excursions on Table Talk are a feature, not a bug.

We’ll chat for at least a couple of hours, including questions from and discussion with the audience, and may go on longer (three hours has been fairly routine for Table Talk, and we’ve gone as long as five).

Giving back

Table Talk will stay free to attend and free to listen to or watch later, for as long as I can afford to keep it that way. But we would like to use our privilege to help others, so we’re asking our guests to choose a cause.

Vidya’s choice is The Banyan, which, she says, “does stellar work in rehabilitating and housing at risk, mentally ill women in Chennai (and across Tamil Nadu).” You can donate to The Banyan‘s work here.

Attending

You will need to go to the Zoom link and register with a valid email address, after which you will get the link to join the event.

To get notifications of new episodes and links to past episodes, please subscribe to:
- this Google Group: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ttandfps
- and / or this Telegram Channel: https://t.me/TTandFPS

(About Table Talk and past guests.)

Confronting change

“How could any sane person support X?”

“Why would an otherwise humane person do Y?”

“Do they not see the harm that Z causes?”

For X, Y, Z, insert anything that you see as harmful, antisocial, destructive. For example, pollution from fireworks, women not being ‘allowed’ to work, meat eating, namaaz in the streets, public displays of religiosity, pride in dominant caste birth, state-paid-for religious festivities.

It’s worth examining this, I think.

Perfectly nice, kind people can react in seemingly irrational ways when their beliefs, their acts (from their perspective, perhaps, their sense of self), are questioned or mocked. Even if it is something that they have not thought through but comply with, or in other ways perpetuate, because it’s what they grew up with and it does not feel offensive or wrong to them. It puts their backs up, I think, makes them act in ‘who do they think they are’ ways.

Very few people can handle such questioning without feeling like they are being attacked, and many will thus tend to react with aggression, which then sets off a spiral downwards.

The person doing the ‘accusing,’ having done the work of thinking things through, may feel what they are saying is self-evident, but it’s not easy, from the perspective of the one being ‘accused,’ to see it when one has invested deeply in an older or different way of thought.

Every reform has faced resistance; sometimes that resistance persists long after reform has, technically, taken place. But it might be more helpful to look at this through a much smaller lens: not at a whole society or even a community or a neighbourhood, but at the individual level.

So I'll throw myself under the microscope for a start.

I was brought up to aspire to be ‘gentlemanly,’ ‘chivalrous.’ My instinctive reaction if accused of being chauvinist was to get prickly, to rail against political correctness and all that. I was lucky to have patient friends who gently gave me other perspectives, and over time, my views evolved. If I had been met with aggression from the start, perhaps that wouldn’t have happened. If I’d been told back then that I was being patriarchal, that I was contributing to a way of life that was condescending to women, demeaning, treating them as possessions, etc., I just wouldn’t have seen it, and would have probably wrapped myself in my cloak of virtue and huffed indignantly. (I’d also like to think that I wouldn’t have doubled down on my behaviour or refused to think about it, but who knows?)

This is all rather random thinking aloud and lacking flow. So let me just ask, do you have thoughts on this?