Oh, how I hate Masterchef!

 Let me count the ways…

I’ve always been a fan of food shows on television. There is something infinitely comforting about sitting down for half an hour or so and watching someone cook a lovely meal on the telly. You can lose yourself in the colour of the ingredients, the gleam of the kitchen utensils, and the expertise of the TV cook. Everything comes together seamlessly as she – yes, I know you’re visualizing Nigella Lawson now, as one does – peels and chops, roasts and fries, and then serves up a delicious spread to friends and family. You can almost taste the roast lamb and potatoes, hear the satisfying crunch as a crab claw gives up its succulent meat, and smell the vanilla scent rising from the bread-and-butter pudding. It’s a food feast for all your senses, even if it’s one step removed from reality.

And then, there’s the Anthony Bourdain school of food telly. Here, you get taken to one exotic location after another, shown the kinds of dishes that you’ve never ever seen, heard of, or even dared to imagine. You go from the street food of Bangkok to the tapas bars of Barcelona, from the backwaters of Kerala to the sushi bars of Tokyo, from the brassieres of rural France to the gritty streets of New York’s Chinatown. And you get a vicarious taste of the world, thanks to your intrepid host, as you watch open-mouthed from your couch.

In shows like these, it is the dishes that are centre-stage, the meals which are the stars of the show, and the entire point of the exercise is to appreciate food in all its infinite variety. The hosts are just there to tease out the flavours, the colours and the aromas, and of course, to eat on our behalf. What’s not to love?

And then, there are shows like Masterchef, which take food in all its life-affirming glory and transform it into an instrument of mental torture; which take the art of cooking and suck all the joy out of it so that rather than being an act of nurture it turns into an exercise in humiliation. What Masterchef does, one cook-off at a time, is snatch away all the pleasure that you derive from feeding others, leaving gut-wrenching anxiety in its wake. It is less a food show or even a cooking contest and more a gladiatorial smackdown in which only one winner will be left standing in a field of cooking casualties. Seriously, what’s not to hate?

Food should be infused with the love you cook it with, not contaminated by tension and stress. It should be served up with smiles of pleasure, not with a side order of the tears you shed because you feared elimination from a competition. And it certainly shouldn’t lead to ritual humiliation if you don’t hit exactly the right spot.

As if this was not enough, there’s the generous lashings of emotional manipulation thrown into the mix. Nearly every participant has a hard luck story: there’s the single mother cooking on a budget for her daughter; the recent immigrant who can only rely on his culinary skills to get ahead; and thus it goes.

I am sure that all of them are very worthy people who deserve to make it big. But, to tell the truth, I am not terribly interested in their backstories. And all that hyperventilating about how nervous they are in a professional kitchen and how scared they are of elimination: frankly, it leaves me cold. When I tune in to see a food show, I’d like it to be about the food, thank you very much.

Ah, the food! There is something soul-destroying about the poncy little plates that are served up to the judges, weighed down as they are by gimmickry and artifice. Give me a good, honest dish any day, with clean flavours, fresh ingredients simply cooked, and served up with the minimum of fuss. Instead, we get ten kinds of fiddly garnishes, complicated sauces, all of it peppered by pretension.

And that’s before we even get on to the ‘experts’ on the panel. There is something risible about such chefs as Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White lecturing the participants about calmness and communication in the kitchen. These are men who have built their reputations on their abusive behavior in their own kitchens. During their careers, they have turned the air blue in every kitchen they ever worked in, with their extensive vocabulary of four-letter words. They have turned bullying into a fine art. Their kitchens are hothouses of tension, stress and full-on fear. And then, they turn up on our TV screens, holding forth on the virtues of ‘calm’. Give me a break.

But leaving everything else aside, you know what is the saddest thing of Masterchef? It’s the fact that it makes cooking appear stressful and scary rather than fun and relaxing. Watching the participants fret and fume, or go into full-on meltdown mode, doesn’t really inspire us to get cooking. And that, at the end of the day, is the real pity.

Kitchen confidential

Sadly, the only people who can afford dream kitchens are those who wouldn’t dream of ever stepping into one

Don’t you just love the shiny, sprawling, spotless kitchens that feature in all those glossy interior design magazines? They come in shades of yellow and green, pale pastels, crisp white, or even monochromatic grey. But no matter what the colour, all of them look like perfect settings for our own inner Domestic Goddess.

Sometimes they are done in faux vintage style with brass and copper implements suspended from the roof. Sometimes they aspire to the minimal look, with every cooking appliance tucked away in storage cupboards. Sometimes there is a nice worktop where you can chop and peel away to your heart’s content. And sometimes there is a tiny table with bar stools where you can catch a hasty breakfast. There is a kitchen to cater to every taste; a kitchen to meet every need.

I don’t know about you but I can spend endless afternoons salivating over the visuals of these kitchens, dreaming of a time when I can finally afford one. Needless to say, that time is unlikely to come – well, at least, not in this lifetime. But hey, a girl can dream, right?

And since you ask, the kitchen of my dreams is a sunlit vision in primrose yellow offset with the palest of pale ivory. There is a large central island with cheerful wicker seating for my friends to lounge around in with a glass of wine while I rustle up a three-course meal (warning: only those who help with the chopping of the salad get dessert). The cooking range is set against a picture window looking on to a patch of garden outside, where fresh herbs grow, ready for the picking. The oven and microwave are industrial-sized but hidden away behind a glass counter. And the shelves are heaving with every ingredient known to Nigella – and then some.

Yes, okay, I admit it. A huge part of my longing for this kind of kitchen comes from watching far too many food shows set in picture-perfect kitchens. It is another matter that these ‘kitchens’ are set in studios rather than in the anchor’s home (yes, even Nigella’s!). But such is the fantasy of domesticity they conjure up that even those of us who can’t really cook want a kitchen that looks just like that – perhaps in the mistaken belief that once the hob is in place the cooking skills will surely follow.

And then, there are all those television serials that nurture the dream. In my case, it all started with Friends, where everyone congregates in Monica’s open-plan kitchen in good times and bad. The kitchen in Brothers and Sisters where Nora Walker feeds her extended family, provided further fodder. And more recently, the open-plan kitchens in Castle, where the mystery novel writer noshes and joshes with his mother and daughter, have fed the fantasy.

The first open-plan kitchen I ever saw in real life was when I went to interview Shah Rukh and Gauri Khan for a cover story (for Sunday magazine, where I then worked). This was before Shah Rukh became Shah Rukh, if you know what I mean, and I was granted the kind of access that hacks can only dream of these days.

As I sat with the Khans in the open-plan living-cum-kitchen area of their first Mumbai home – a humble flat in Bandra – listening to the story of how they first met and fell in love, a couple of things became rapidly clear to me. One: this was the kind of kitchen I wanted when I grew up. And two: I would have to give up on dal and subzi because open-plan kitchens were not conducive to Indian cooking unless you were happy to co-exist with the smell of roasting spices.

As it happens, life didn’t turn out quite like that. And now, as I wander disconsolately through the humungous design showrooms in the malls of Delhi and Mumbai, I realise that my entire real-life flat would fit into one of these dream kitchens and still leave space for more. And given the price of urban property, I am guessing that it’s much the same for most of us.

Which begs the question: who among us can actually afford these dream kitchens that are forever being advertised in the media? And I don’t just mean in terms of money – though the price tag, upwards of Rs 5 lakhs and going up to 25, would give anyone pause – but also in terms of space.

Unless you are a multi-millionaire with money to burn, my guess is that you live in an average-size flat. And flats like these aren’t big enough for one of those spacious kitchens stuffed with every gadget and gizmo that money can buy. In fact, ordinary folk like you and me consider ourselves lucky if we can squeeze in a microwave and oven-griller-toaster into our modest kitchen spaces.

Sadly, the only people who can afford the kind of dream kitchens I fantasise about are people who wouldn’t ever dream of stepping into one. These are the people who leave both the cooking and serving to the staff, and wouldn’t recognise a vegetable slicer even if it took their index finger off. And yet, to them are granted the nicest kitchens of all.

Ah, the little ironies of life – you’ve just got to love them.