OPERATION RATATOUILLE

One of the avatars I would like myself to be – a chef! Always had a crush on foodstuff – especially of kurumkurum genre. But that love and crush was limited to savoring the taste and its subsequent consumption. Never really thought about the art of cooking, the brains required, the kai chalaka, the intricacy and delicacies involved. I seldom fancied these just because I never really put a serious thought on this art. It took an animated movie to inspire me and awaken the latent (now drowsing) chef in me and that is – Ratatouille: Anybody can cook. The amazing movie has grabbed a sizeable chunk of my gray cells and put them to thought – Anybody can cook!

I always relate cooking to fabrication of an IC chip in our terms, in a sense that the processes involved from raw materials to start with till the last step of testing has to be perfect. In this regard a potato chip is no different from an IC chip! The 3D motion of our fingers, the relative distance between them, the correlation and angle between them, the motion of our hands in the spatial domain, the radius of the circle whose center is at the center of the utensil while stirring for uniform heating – sounds complex isn’t it? But that is the beauty of the nature. In our life we do many such things unaware whose awareness would make that task complex or sometimes impossible. As the general of Prison Break fame says – Sometimes, everything is not as it seems!

The next tryst with the chef inside me was during the recent kannada sangha celebrations. One of my companion said I belong to the PULCHAR type. Well, that’s true. I define Pulchar as the acronym for PULiyogare, CHakkuli and sARu which fairly defines various verticals of ‘cook-n-relish’ group I am interested in. Taste buds certainly swing into action & hyper-activity and my favorite’s kitty is well-defined by pulchar.

I have had my bit of volunteering(?) in preparing mouth-watering dishes especially during ganesh chaturthi and deepawali. I was kinda assistant to the assistant cook in the 3 chef hierarchy! Well, that position too plays a vital role, right? I have tried my hand, literally, in preparing chakli, kodbale, nippattu, badaam-puri,kara-kadubu,holige and some more as an assistant to the assistant cook(my sis who assists my mom!). Well, these ‘performances’ were favorable as I had the advantage of being at the ‘home’ ground well supported (and tolerated) by ‘home’ crowd. My out-of-home-experience was in Kodagu where I (again) tried my hand in dosa. Dosa is supposed to be globe-shaped in2D but my dosa depicted world-map with skewed continents!

 

That apart, I have been quite successful at the third level in the hierarchy. To expect a promotion to next level, I’ve to improve my success-rate and record which, no doubt, requires more practice. Right now, my cooking is strikingly similar to the way we answer VTU questions – initially it ‘appears’ logically correct and on the course. As we continue penning, our answers get skewed and we bring in all kind of redundancies, out of shape diagrams and out of context concepts. I hope the initial interest in the art of cooking prevails and surge in the years to come and I transform into a chief chef from an aide. I dream myself saying these words after few years – ‘aham chefasmi’.

 

If my interviewer asks me where would you like to see yourselves twenty years down the line, I would love to answer – In the kitchen, helping my mom and my spouse but only as a hobby or as an alternate/part-time job(Now, that depends on my spouse!). Ok...  Again, if my interviewer wants to know what would you look back at after you are a septuagenarian, my answer would be related to my ‘humble’ beginning as an assistant to the assistant chef in my teens.

‘Operation ratatouille – Anybody can cook’ is underway……