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.

Stirring stuff

Hey ladies, it may be time to reclaim the kitchen!

I spent part of this weekend on the fringes of a cooking competition, watching as eager young amateur chefs tried their hands in a professional kitchen. There was an even gender divide, and quite frankly, there wasn't much to choose between the men and the women as far as skill sets went. The winner got a substantial cash prize and a cooking show on Youtube. (And no, sorry, I can't tell you whether a woman won...)

The day after the competition ended, I found myself at lunch with some friends in the hotel business. "So," I asked, fresh from my experience at the cook-off, "do your kids like to cook?"

"Oh no," replied the lady, "I told my daughter from the beginning that the kitchen is a trap. Once you get in there, there is no getting out."

I must confess to being startled, never having seen it quite like that. Is the kitchen really some sort of swamp that sucks you in, or even sucks the life out of you? Is the gas range a place where the dreams of young girls go to die a fiery death? Does roasting, grilling, frying, baking, make a kitchen slave out of you?

Well, I have been turning over this conversation in my mind ever since and while I totally get where my friend was coming from, I think we are doing a disservice to our daughters by telling them to get out of the kitchen or else...

Yes, there was a point in time when kitchen work was sheer drudgery, when women could end up spending entire lifetimes sweating behind the stove, putting food on the table for their families. There was an era in which men wouldn’t be seen dead cooking; the mark of masculinity was to be waited on hand and foot. And yes, it wasn't that long ago that women would routinely be told that their place was in the kitchen; and I can only imagine how bloody annoying that must have been.

That's probably why the first wave of feminists regarded housework as something to be rid of, why they saw the kitchen as a cage within which entire generations of women had been imprisoned, and why friends like mine advised their daughters to steer clear of this stifling jail.

If you ask me, though, those days are long gone. We now live in a world in which the kitchen has become an intensely glamorous space. It is a place where high-powered careers are forged in the fire, where celebrity chefs pout and preen, where food bloggers find their inspiration and their place in the sun. These days, it is entirely possible to get both fame and fortune from behind the kitchen range. Just think how Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson have spun their cooking abilities to gain world-wide celebrity. Or even how Manish Mehrotra and Gaggan Anand have become household names in India.

Men have cottoned on to this transformation and no longer treat the kitchen as a no-go area, and cooking as something beneath contempt. They experiment with recipes, they write food blogs, they review restaurants, they publish cookbooks, they pitch for TV shows. They realise that the kitchen now represents a career opportunity like any other.

Don't you think it's time women caught on as well? Well, some do, and have made the most of the opportunities cooking represents in the modern world. But there are still too many women who view the kitchen with suspicion, as a cunning trap set to lure them in and tie them down. And that is truly a pity.

But even if we leave all this stuff about careers and fame and fortune aside for a moment, and just think of the sheer pleasure involved in making a meal for those you care about, the kitchen begins to look like a far less scary place. That's when cooking ceases to be a chore and becomes an act of love.

And just for that, it might be worth it to put on that apron, break out that recipe book your grandmum left you, and reclaim the kitchen.

eom

Vanity fair

There is something wrong with a world in which your man has more beauty products than you do

So, what is it going to be? Go grey with dignity? Or dye unto death? I am, for a change, talking about men here. Should the male of the species allow nature to take its course or should he fall back on the marvels of artifice and hair colour?

I can see the arguments on both sides of the dye divide. Grey hair on men can be both distinguished and sexy in a slightly rakish George Clooney/Richard Gere sort of way. It shows that you have grown up and – with a bit of luck – grown out of childish things. You are ready to be taken seriously. And, more importantly, you have more weighty things to think about than the greying of your locks.

On the other hand, there is no denying the fact that greying hair only suits a few people like Kapil Sibal or my former boss Aveek Sarkar. On most others, well, it just makes them look old – sometimes much older than they really are. So, the temptation to reach out for a bit of hair colour is quite understandable.

And in today’s age, when people are judged by appearances more than ever, it is only to be expected that everyone from David Cameron and Barack Obama to Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan is hitting the bottle (of hair dye, I hasten to add) with a vengeance.

These days, it’s all about looking youthful and seeming virile. And frankly, what’s wrong with that?

If we don’t judge women for booking themselves in for fortnightly root touch-ups interspersed with the odd session of highlights, then why should we treat men who dabble in dye with derision?

But while I am willing to grant men a dispensation when it comes to hair colour, I must confess that I have a problem with some of the more outré expressions of male vanity you see on display of late.

Call me sexist – and I am sure you will – but I can’t help but feel that there is something faintly ludicrous about men signing up for a ‘pampering facial’ complete with steaming open of pores, removal of blackheads and a little gentle massage. Whatever happened to the days when men just had an extra-close shave when they were looking for smoother skin? When did all these exfoliating scrubs, deep-cleansing creams and hydrating moisturisers (with an SPF count of no less than 30) find their way into the male grooming routine?

I am guessing it was about the time that the word metrosexual first crept into our dictionary. But even allowing for the fact that men have as much of a right to smell nice and have silky smooth skin as women, don’t you think that things are getting a tad out of hand now?

Now be honest here, ladies. Don’t you feel that there is something wrong with a world in which he has more skincare products than you do? Doesn’t it annoy you that he spends more time than you in front of the mirror worrying about his complexion (and wondering if it’s worth giving Fair and Handsome a whirl)? Isn’t it plain wrong that he has more clothes than you do and spends far longer in front of his wardrobe agonising about what to wear? Or that he takes much longer than you to get dressed for an evening out? (I mean, seriously, what is that about? Keeping a man waiting while you fussed over your make-up was just about the last honest pleasure left to us!)

And don’t even get me started on this new-fangled craze for male depilation. There is something faintly ridiculous about all that waxing of chest hair, so that those man boobs built up so carefully at the gym can be displayed to their best advantage. You know the kind of guys who do this kind of stuff, don’t you? The kind who model themselves on Salman Khan, spend all their free time in the gym, admiring their own muscles in the mirror as they work out their glutes/pecs/or whatever the hell they are called. And then, it’s off for a steam and sauna, until they finally shower with their lime-scented gels and moisturise, moisturise, moisturise.

In keeping with the Salman Khan image, hair is a big obsession as well. And it’s not just aspiring models and film stars who are signing up for hair weaves, hair extensions or even, the Holy Grail of them all, hair transplants. These days everyone wants thick lustrous hair, from your Average Joe in middle management to the foul-mouthed macho chef Gordon Ramsay (who was recently pictured with that tell-tale bandage at the back of his head). In India, rumour has it, even young male stars sign on for the procedure – not because they are balding (far from it) but simply because it would give them a thicker head of hair.

I’m sorry, but what exactly is sexy about a man who is so insecure about his looks that he has to have a surgical procedure to boost his own confidence? I’ll take the insouciant charm of a bald Sean Connery or a shaven Bruce Willis over this kind of self-consciousness any day. And so, I suspect, would most women.

Truth be told, there is something faintly repellent about this new-found, over-the-top vanity of men. And it makes me long for the days when a dash of Old Spice was all they needed to work their magic.