A hobby I picked late in my life was Cooking. Though I was quite comfortable making tea and coffee for self till I was 36, cooking a meal was beyond me. I took up the task of becoming a decent cook on my 36th birthday and gave a timespan of 4 years to achieve the objective.There was a brahmin lady called Meenakshi Ammal who became a widow at a young age. She was a wonderful cook. In mid 1950s her nieces and grand nieces got married and set up nucleus families. They used to pester Meenakshmi ammal for recipes. Though cooking came naturally to her, she could not create recipes. She tried out each of the dishes, made careful note of the quantities used and then mailed it in inland letters to her nieces. Much later a relative of hers collected all these recipes and went around trying to find a publisher. He succeeded after 2 years. Thus was born the legendary cook book Samaithu Par'. This book is in 3 volumes and is the most authentic book on Tamil Brahmin Vegetarian Cooking. Millions of copies have been sold since. It has also been translated to other Regional Languages and English. You can get more details here http://www.meenakshiammal.com/.
To cut a long story short, this book was my single point reference. Initially I stuck to the quantities mentioned and later on I started improvising on my own. Like many other things in my life, I put my heart and soul into it and developed a passion for cooking.
Cooking, to me, is a very creative art. If one were to look at it as a chore, then one would never become a good cook. One needs to have a passion for it and should clearly enjoy cooking. 9 years on, I can safely say that I am more than a pretty decent cook.
Unlike all the other hobbies which are more self centred - be it reading, music, sports, photography, crosswords or astrology - cooking is extremely other person centred. This is the distinction. As a cook you get your reward when you see the happiness and contentment in another persons face on eating the dishes prepared by you. Cooking is all about giving. Understanding the taste preferences of others and meeting it. And it is a personal gesture. No amount of food purchased from hotels and served to a guest can compensate for the personal effort that goes into making a dish. It is a way of telling I honour you and am prepared to go that extra distance to make you happy. And this is highly appreciated by the guest. Our culture is made famous by the statement 'Adhithi Devo Bhava' and offering tasty food cooked by oneself is our way of realizing this.
More than anything else, cooking contributed a lot to making me a more open, understanding person and less self centred. Cooking is all about giving and this is one trait that always comes in handy in one's professional life.
In a world infested with 'takers', a 'giver' stands apart
