Cooking Shooking Hai Rabba!

How many years do you think you will live, let us take 70 as a target. Not a inappropriate figure, one must say! So it amounts to 25 Thousand days!

Now tell me ask, do you brush your teeth daily? Ah what a embarrassing question, of course you do, I am right, right? Every morning standing in front of the mirror you do it involuntarily as if the brush is driving you instead.

Just one more question, you learnt to dress yourself, answer your nature calls with due respect and many daily tasks like tying your shoe laces? Now, now do not scare me with your growling... You have.

Now, let me analyse your answers in good mind. Why did you learn them? Was it because, it was something, you realized that you have to do all your life everyday and will make you run away in shame if you could not? Or was it because that you realized that these daily activities will amount to 25 thousand iterative activities overall, for which it would not be wise to be dependant on others, better do it yourself?

I hope it was the latter one.

Having answered my own questions (funny), I stand before a great paradox.

So what was the figure, yes ok, 25K. We all agree, including the chubby ones (chubby and cute are the emotionally correct words for Fat People) that we consume 3 meals per day. No, you Miss, please I am not asking abnormal diet crazy people like you who will have 10 meals consisting of only a banana or a slice of bread. So where I was, yes, 75K instances in one's life where one indulges in enjoying a meal. Don't you think it is also one of the mundane daily iterative tasks we undergo! If you agree, then lets move forward to our discussion.

My target observation group was those folks who are out there in the wilderness of towns (unlucky) or cities (unlucky again) for the sake of a job which, throughout their life, will steer them well away from their home-town and parents or say from a family.

While I had the opportunity to chit-chat with many of such candidates, I noticed that the responses lay in the below phrases:

A: “Baap re, who will cook man, I eat at the nearest Meal centre, not yummy but then issue resolved”

B: “Kya yaar, who will select, buy, wash, peel, cut, cook, serve, aur phir, wash dishes. Not me Bro”

C: “Hey, do you see me married already, enjoy Bachelor life Dude”

D: “It is so tough, Bhai, certainly not for me, also it takes so much time”

E: “I will not, why will I, am I a woman” (I hate this response very much, different issue, different article)

F: “Hey I cannot, who will eat the dish I cooked, after all I am such a bad cook”

G: “Never thought about cooking, hey we are on the topic of food, well I am hungry, lets go to McDonalds to grab a bite” (I liked this one the most as the other person paid)

All I have to say after analysing these responses is that, we, somewhere in our mind have a very humongous and a very complex and incorrect view of the art of cooking. Well to say cooking is a art is totally incorrect in the sense that it is absolutely not a art that one has to master. Since folks view it as a art and therefore do not step in the territory of kitchen thinking it suitable for a selected few, cooking has remained elusive from the list of one's daily routine!

My stand on the Cooking-For-All campaign is that let us treat it as an daily activity and we will see that it will reduce to the level of the activity of brushing one's teeth.

Today, when we have a plethora of appliances ready to grind, mince, mix and boil at our command and we have all sorts of spices and purées ready made, I hope it requires neither the perspiration of a mill worker nor the experience and guts of a Business Tycoon to cook.

Let us give it a try, what say guys! I am certain we would not like to be dependent on others for the daily task which touches the amazing figure of 75,000 iterations in a lifetime and not be running away in shame.