Showing posts with label Anthony Bourdain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anthony Bourdain. Show all posts
Almost every dish we celebrate as heritage was, at some point, a survival strategy-Hansal Mehta
10:38 AM
Hansal Mehta, who is helming ‘Khana Dil Se’ decades after ‘Khana Khazana’, hopes to give the audience culinary stories instead of competitive cooking
Mohar Basu (MID-DAY; May 13, 2026)
Food, according to Hansal Mehta, is one of the strongest places memory lives. And Khana Dil Se, his way of holding on to his family’s memories. “I realized the recipes my mother, aunt, and father-in-law made would slip away if no one held on to them,” reflected the filmmaker.
The filmmaker, known for politically charged dramas like Shahid, Scam 1992 and Scoop, says food became another way to talk about memory. “Food is one of the last places memory lives,” he says, adding that the pilot episode is an attempt to “find and reinvent” his mother’s Undhiyu.
So, Mehta went back to the kitchen for Khana Dil Se, just as he had done in the early 1990s when he directed the genre-defining cooking show, Khana Khazana. But this time, there’s a new ingredient — Artificial Intelligence (AI). Agreeing that filmmakers’ concerns about AI replacing artistes are legitimate, he asserted that AI is not at the forefront of his show.
“The families and their recipes are what the show is about. AI is a tool that helps me tell that story. Working the conventional way means animation budgets, period reconstructions, and location shoots. These costs put this kind of show out of reach for almost everyone. AI lets me do that visual work at a fraction of the time and cost.”
Even as we have seen a surge in competitive cooking shows, meaningful culinary storytelling is absent from Indian platforms. That’s a void Mehta hopes to fill with his YouTube show.
“We have travel-and-eat shows, we have competitions, we have celebrity chef formats. What we don’t have are enough shows documenting our recipes. Somebody Feed Phil is a wonderful show, but it’s an outsider’s affectionate gaze, and that’s not the same as an insider’s archive. India has, conservatively, a few hundred distinct culinary traditions, most of them undocumented in any serious filmed form. The platforms might not be wrong that conventional food shows have lost captivity. They’re wrong about why. Audiences haven’t stopped caring about food. They’ve stopped accepting cooking shows that have become more like a sports league than a kitchen. The plan is to make something good enough that the question of where it sits primary network, streaming, somewhere we haven’t thought of yet becomes a happy problem rather than a strategic one. I’ve been around long enough to know you can’t reverse-engineer a hit by deciding the platform first. You make the show. If it’s the show people are talking about, the platforms come. I’d love for ambitious, archival, slow-cooked food television to find its way back to the kind of mainstream audience Khana Khazana once had. There’s a generation that grew up watching Sanjeev on Sunday mornings and is now raising children of their own. I think they’re ready for a food show that takes them, and the food, seriously again."
The show also leans heavily into the politics of food, something Mehta says was inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s worldview. “Bourdain was right about nearly everything, and food being political was the most important thing he kept saying. Take Gosht Nihari. We tend to think of nihari as a single dish, Lucknow’s, Delhi’s, or Karachi’s. It’s actually three different preparations across a border that didn’t exist when the recipe was written. Nihari was perhaps born in 18th-century Shahjahanabad as labourers’ food. A pot left on dying embers overnight so it would be ready before fajr prayer. The Nawabs of Awadh refined it in Lucknow, perfumed it with kewra and rose. After Partition, it crossed into Karachi in the mouths of refugees and became a national obsession in Pakistan. Three cities, three versions of a single dish, separated by a line on a map. Most of the great Indian dishes are working-class food that the courts later adopted, not the other way around. Nihari belonged to soldiers and dyers before it belonged to Nawabs. Undhiyu was farmers’ communal food, with multiple Patidar and Koli families contributing vegetables to a single pot buried in a shared field at Uttarayan. Butter chicken, which will be featured in our third episode, was invented by Punjabi refugees in 1947 Delhi who had to figure out what to do with leftover tandoori chicken. Almost every dish we celebrate as heritage was, at some point, a survival strategy."
Bourdain’s death made me scared that I may never shake the pain-Shaheen Bhatt
8:43 AM
Screenwriter Shaheen Bhatt’s debut book ‘I’ve Never Been (un)Happier’ is a candid account of her 20-year-long struggle with depression and life in a famous filmi family. She spoke to Shobita Dhar about how writing helped her survive the dark times
Shobita Dhar (THE TIMES OF INDIA; January 12, 2020)
You make an interesting point in the book about how we have fetishised happiness. This often puts pressure on people to appear happy all the time and not pay attention to their sadness. Is that why people delay seeking help?
If we’re not happy all the time we’re programmed to automatically assume that there’s something wrong with us. No one wants to feel like they’re a broken thing that needs fixing, no one wants to feel like they’re weak so you delay getting help because even the idea of “getting help” has negative connotations. It suggests that you’re incapable. It suggests that you have somehow lost control. There’s also a general resistance built into us when it comes to talking about ‘negative’ or unpleasant feelings or things. As a result, we often don’t even know how to talk about anything remotely difficult.
The book includes many moving and terrifying pages from the diary you kept. Did writing help you through the dark days?
I’ve journalled since I was 12 years old, which is when depression first started for me. I had to do something with the overwhelming feelings I was experiencing, so I wrote about them. Writing has been one of the greatest tools for healing — it helped me process and expel every bad feeling I couldn’t make sense of. It helped me see patterns, it helped me understand myself better and it helped me get through it all.
You’ve been very candid — your dad’s addiction to first alcohol and then work, your own troubled relationship with food and alcohol, your insecurities when Alia found fame. Now that the book is out, do you regret your honesty even a teeny tiny bit?
Launching a book involves a lot of press and talking about yourself especially if you’ve written about yourself, and talking about myself is something that I’m not used to doing. It feels self-indulgent and self-involved to me. For me, the only time I regretted it was when I had to discuss myself in interviews and I was worried that the larger message (about mental health) was getting lost. Otherwise — nope, no regrets. I’ve never really been afraid of sharing because my entire family is one that shares — we’re honest and we value vulnerability.
The account of the demons you fought is very hard to read. How hard was it to for you to write this, and what made you decide to put your pain to paper?
It was definitely hard — I had to relive things I didn’t want to. I had to go back to dark places. It sent me back into a bit of a slump that I’ve only just about gotten out of. However, it was also incredibly rewarding. It taught me so much more about myself and it allowed me the chance for profound connection with a lot of people — in the end it’s been really good for me.
You have talked about how deeply affected you were by the deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. What was it that bothered you the most — the dissonance between their celebrity lives and their personal pain?
What bothered me the most was that these two, seemingly successful, middle-aged people were unable to shake the pain so far into their life. It was the fear that twenty years from now, I might still feel like this. You hope that by a certain age you will get better at least partially. It’s scary to think that you might not. It’s scary to think that there’s potentially another 30 or 40 more years of this in my future.
As a screenwriter, do you feel the way the Hindi movie industry portrays mental health needs to change?
To start with perhaps we need to tell more stories about mental health. It’s important also that we tell these stories with sensitivity and portray mental illnesses as accurately as we can. Caricaturing mental illness is dangerous because it spreads the wrong information and colour general perception. Movies are one of the best tools we have to spread messages world over and it’s always great when you can use that to good effect.
You have written about how depression affected all your relationships. Has the book helped your sister Alia and your parents understand you better?
Through my book my family has better understood the intricacies of what my mind is like on a bad day. It’s hard to let someone in when you’re in the throes of something because your focus is on just getting through it. This has helped them understand what is happening behind closed doors when I sometimes isolate myself. Through this book I’ve been able to let them into that part of my life in a much bigger way and I’ve been able to explain things to them that were hard for me to explain at one point. They’ve always understood me but through this book they saw what I’d been hiding.
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