Table Talk with Varun Deshpande

Table Talk with Varun Deshpande
Date: 23 January, 2022
Time: 21:00 IST

In India, contrary to some western belief, most of us aren’t vegetarian. True, our per capita consumption of animal protein is nowhere near as much as in some more developed economies, but there are a lot of us, so we wind up eating a fair amount between us. I’m a meat eater too, but not one with an untroubled conscience. I’ve tried over the years to reduce my consumption of meat, eating it maybe once or twice a week, but I like it too much to quit entirely.

So, a few years ago, when I was with The Hindu, I was intrigued when my friend Lynn de Souza forwarded some material to me from the Good Food Institute, which had begun operations in India, and suggested I meet up with them. I did, and I have followed their work since. GFI is an international network of non-profits that works towards sustainable ways of giving us our protein, allying with scientists, foundations, governments, entrepreneurs, and corporations.

Our guest this Sunday is Varun Desphande, MD of GFI Asia. Varun has been deeply immersed in healthcare and technology from a very young age, studied chemical and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, and has worked on implementing digital health in India and the USA.

We will talk, as we usually do on Table Talk, about formative food memories, and from there we will go on to his journey to GFI and why he chose this work to focus on and more about what GFI does. Along the way, we will learn about the two main streams in this field, lab-gown meat and plant-based meat substitutes, and what the latest developments are. We will chat for a couple of hours, more if Varun and you folks are amenable. And, as ever, there will be plenty of time for audience questions.

Giving back

Table Talk is free to attend, but we ask our guests to name a charity or cause they support, and we ask those attending to make a donation to that cause, Varun has two choices, GFI itself — it is a non-profit, as I said above, and this is their donation page — and Fortify Health Foundation, which works on anaemia and neural tube defects in India, through flour fortification. You can find out how to donate via this page.

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.

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(About Table Talk and past guests.)

Chances are…

There was a time in advertising, when a lot of ad copy started with ‘Chances are…’

And back when I was a junior trainee dogsbody in Lintas, my reporting boss, Cherian Varghese, reacted to copy we showed him with either ‘Chances are there’ or, more often, ‘Chances are lesssss.’

These things are important for context.

So, one night, we were all up late in Express Towers, finishing off stuff for the weekly meeting at our big client in Pune. Our creative director and the client servicing team would be at VT in the morning to catch the Deccan Queen to go present stuff to the client’s top brass. There was a lot of work, print ads, hoardings, TV scripts, and below-the-line stuff like leaflets.

Cherry kept bouncing our ideas, our headlines, body copy even. We heard ‘Chances are less’ many times that night. At some point, in one of the smaller items, one of us put dummy copy in the layout as a place-holder. Only, instead of the usual Lorem Ipsum, we filled up the available space with ‘Chances are less, chances are less, chances are less,’ and ended with ‘Chances are there.’ We were mighty amused with our wit.

We ordered dinner. The night wore on. We were tired. We took printouts, made mock-ups, packed envelopes with the creative that the junior AE would ferry to the station.

We forgot* to change the dummy text.

The next day, Adi Pocha, our CD, was presenting the creative. When it came to this leaflet, glancing down seeing copy starting with ‘Chances are,’ which, as I said, was a bit commonplace, he didn’t tell client that the layout had placeholder copy which would be worked out later, as he would have normally, and began to read.

The next day at the agency, Adi, to his credit, didn’t chew us out. He just said, ‘You bastards.’

* Or did we?

Table Talk with Kurush Dalal

Table Talk with Kurush Dalal
Date: 9 January, 2022
Time: 21:00 IST

Kurush has been our guest before, so I won’t re-introduce him. We will chat this time about the same broad area: the intersections of food, cooking, archaeology, anthropology, culture, and also what he’s been doing since we chatted back in May.

We’ll chat for at least a couple of hours, including questions from and discussion with the audience, and may go on longer, if Kurush and you are willing.

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:
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(About Table Talk and past guests.)

Table Talk with Anita Roy, Kishi Arora, Krish Ashok, Kriti Monga, Kurush Dalal, Ranjini Rao, Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, Saba Mahjoor

Table Talk with with Anita Roy, Kishi Arora, Krish Ashok, Kriti Monga, Kurush Dalal, Ranjini Rao, Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, Saba Mahjoor
Date: December 26, 2021
Time: 20:00 IST

Table Talk brings the year to an end with an informal chat with as many of our 2020 guests as could make it.

We’ll be looking back at the year and what we have learnt from it, with reference to food, but, as we have found through these past conversations, that can intersect with just about anything.

And of course we look forward to all of you joining us too.

We’ll chat for two to three hours, maybe more if you and our guests are willing.

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:
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(About Table Talk and past guests)

Check this

What connects Chennai, Scottish Lace, Brooks Brothers, David Ogilvy, and a pioneering Indian luxury hotel chain?

In the 1950s, CP Krishnan Nair, who had quit the army, helped start the All India Handloom Board. He was also an entrepreneur, one who started multiple companies, many named after his wife. At one point, he sold a shipment of madras fabric (worth a look-up on its own, if you’re not familiar with it) to an American buyer, with the warning that the cloth should only be washed gently in cold water or the fabric would bleed. Someone neglected to tell Brooks Brothers, who had bought a sizeable amount of the cloth, about this. And so the clothes they made from the fabric went out to customers without appropriate washing instructions, and the bright dyes bled, and the colours faded.

The importer summoned Nair to the USA, threatened legal action. Instead they worked out a brilliant compromise and turned this lemon into lemonade.

They arranged an interview with Nair with Seventeen magazine. He made up from whole cloth (hehe) a story about this fabric made exclusively for Brooks Brother, and the mag ran a seven-page piece about “Bleeding Madras — the miracle handwoven fabric from India.”

Ogilvy? He turned the defect into a USP: “Guaranteed to bleed,” the ads said. One catalogue in 1966 carried this copy: “Authentic Indian Madras is completely handwoven from yarns dyed with native vegetable colorings. Home-spun by native weavers, no two plaids are exactly the same. When washed with mild soap in warm water, they are guaranteed to bleed and blend together into distinctively muted and subdued colorings.”

And Scottish Lace? Among the many companies Nair started was a lace-making factory in Sahar, Bombay, named Leela Scottish Lace, which was also the company that sold that fabric which landed up with Brooks Brothers.

And if you were around when the Leela Kempinksi (as it was first called) came up, you may have noticed a sign nearby with the company name. Captain Nair, as he was popularly known, is perhaps best remembered for the hotel chain.

(By the by, there is a town in Oregon, USA, called Madras (population 6,000-odd), and one story is that it was named after madras fabric.)

Bonus: there’s a connection with bermuda shorts.

In the 1930s, the Bermuda Athletic Association would invite Ivy League teams to play their rugby a tournament. This became so popular that there were chartered flights for students, who would bring back clothes they bought there. Among them, plaid- and madras-patterned swimwear and shorts, which then made their way to jackets and suchlike with the preppy New England folks.

Sources Gentleman’s Gazette, Orvis, Madras Musings, Wikipedia article on CP Krishnan Nair

Table Talk with Manu Chandra

Table Talk with Manu Chandra
Date: December 12, 2021
Time: 21:00 IST

The various Olive brands, Toast & Tonic, Monkey Bar, The Fatty Bao, Cantan… You’d think I would have first encountered Manu through one of the many innovative, popular and critically acclaimed restaurants he has nurtured and/or created. But when he was making his mark, I was going through a particularly insolvent phase and then rebuilding from there, and fine dining was something that was, as my young friends say, out of my aukat. I first met him when I was editing ForbesLife India, and he wrote for us about the importance of sourcing local ingredients, and since then, his has been one of the voices on food that I’ve listened to carefully. At one point I somehow wound up on the guest list for the opening of The Fatty Bao in Bombay, and had the additional good fortune of having Manu sit with Antoine and I and informally explain some of the thinking behind his ideas.

The making of Chef Chandra started with an early interest in food and what went into making it and presenting it, and continued with formal study (like previous guest Kishi, he trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and their times there overlapped a bit), apprenticing in celebrated kitchens (Restaurant Daniel, Le Bernardin, Gramercy Tavern, Café Centro, Jean Georges), formative jobs (Mandarin Oriental,  Eyvind Hellstrom’s Bagatelle), prizes (a Sea Food Masters Award for the National Recipe Competition in the USA), before he returned to India, where he joined Olive Beach in Bangalore as Chef de Cuisine.

We will chat about this journey and his other formative influences, his work highlighting locally sourced ingredients, what it takes to be a chef, the challenges of running restaurants — multiple restaurants, each with distinct identities — the joys and sorrows of celebrity, The Social Kitchen, an initiative he is part of that wants to “bring families back to the kitchen or table to interact and talk using new kitchen design,” and what he’s been up to since he decided, a few months ago, to leap into the unknown. 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, if Manu and you are willing.

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.

(I’ll add Manu’s choice here shortly.)

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
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(About Table Talk and past guests.)

At Poetry with Prakriti this Saturday.

 

I’m reading at Poetry with Prakriti this weekend. 11th December, 7 p.m. I.S.T.

Please come by if you’re free and not too Zoomed out? Register (free) here.

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?