Gandhi experimented with Truth. I experiment with Kitchen!

Raju Korti
Necessity, as the wise old proverb goes, is the mother of invention. I have extended this rationale to "...and inventions happen out of experiments." Long before I came to this Mother Earth, there was Mahatma Gandhi who experimented with truth. Decades later, here I am experimenting with the kitchen. This is no comparison because there isn't any. Yet, I will have the audacity to say that at an experimental stage and as experimenters, all stand on an even keel. You just need to sauté your instincts with passion. 

Cooking Paav Bhaji for my one and only wife!

Please note the use of preposition when I said "my experiments with the kitchen and not in the kitchen. That, to me, would mean dumbing down the love of my labour. The rationale is as basic as it can get: No matter how beautiful your theory is; if it doesn't agree with your experiment, it's wrong. In my chequered existence that is more of a jigsaw puzzle, I have been experimenting with this, that and the sundry in a laboratory called life. The one that has given me tangible results is the kitchen where my restless curiosity finds an outlet and feeds my own satisfaction.

My experiments both with and in the kitchen started some 30 years ago, much after I had started my experiments with words. I find parallels in both, stimulating and creative in similar measure. As a writer, on my type-pad I use Teflon-coated words. In the kitchen I use Teflon-coated pans. To quote another maxim, nothing succeeds like success. So one successful experiment after the other tell me that even as a man, the kitchen is a creative place to be -- a fact already established by the mushrooming number males you see hosting cookery shows round the clock. Note the use of word mushrooming! It is the product of my nutritive imagination.

My first statistical inference told me I must learn about the vegetables I need to cook and the spices required to embellish. Garnishing follows. As I have already borne in a random post on my Facebook wall, my limited wisdom acquired from donkey's years have enlightened me that self-help is the best help and being self-taught is the best education. It shaped my culinary instincts and fuelled the experiments that I conducted regularly thereafter. Experiments were driving me to a precision where practice meets the kind of finesse that women across the world already bring to the craft.

My experiments have been highly satisfying, both as a performing cook and then as a consumer. Testimonials from friends, relatives, and most importantly, my better half, show that my trajectory in the kitchen has been exemplary. Starting from cooking vegetables, pulses, lentils, and dishes made from chickpea flour (besan), rawa, maida, noodles, pasta and what have you, I believe I have honed my skills over the years. It has reached a stage where in your comic smug satisfaction, you start laughing at your own joke.

One of my most significant findings is understanding the spices and their potency. Trust me, it is an ocean out there. To say that variety is the spice of life is unfair to the spices. They provide variety to life! That this vast variety and their myriad permutations and combinations can be limitless experimentation is a thought that excites and intrigues me no end. An occasional flop show would only convince me that absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.

One does not have to be a philosopher to find out that satisfaction is the ultimate reward for any creativity. Whatever I have been experimenting in my little kitchen has been good enough for the kind of money one pays for dishes with fancy names in the hotels. Food cooked in home might be no-frills, simple spread but it has the biggest ingredient -- your instinctive temper(ing) and seasoning. As for me, having earned so many rave reviews on the Facebook post, all I can say is: The proof of the pudding lies in its eating. So come, savour and give me a testimonial. It is love's labour.

It is not as if everything that I cook can be pompously described as scrumptious. In the complex cooking algorithm that is defined by the ingenuity of the ingredients you deploy, a little measure here and there has the potential to upset your apple pie. But intuitiveness keeps me going and the experiments leave me more the wiser. It is a universally accepted logic that applies as much to a scientist working in a laboratory to a tenderfoot, half-baked like me dabbling in the kitchen. The findings matter!         

I reiterate that kitchen is the best place for a man to be. All those men served good, wholesome food on a platter every day, must try it. It is creative, inventive, entertaining and, ultimately, rewarding Hats off to the women who do it day in day out and whom men probably take for granted by default than design. Undoubtedly, the biggest and the oldest theft in the history of mankind will be caught the day women start demanding compensation for their labour. And I am no feminist!