: Ashutosh tewari, 27, left Allahabad after graduating five years ago to take up a BPO job in Mumbai. “For a fresher, things couldn’t be better. I planned to work for a few years and then study MBA. I packed my best clothes and was off to a new life,” he says. He shacked up with a few other boys, worked overtime and de-stressed by checking out the sights and sounds of Mumbai. “One fine day, I realised I’d been living on vada pav ever since I had arrived. I wanted the dal-chawal mom made. I tried the dabbawallahs and it didn’t work for me, I queued up at roadside jhunka bhakar eateries with taxi drivers for the spicy, oily thali that came for Rs 18. By the end of three months, I was back home with jaundice and had to take a long leave from work. As I recuperated, the one man I thought about very often was Napoleon Bonaparte. What a guy! He had known an army marches on its stomach,” he says.
There’s a dream job waiting in a different city, or a college in another country. Every day, hundreds of youngsters pack their bags and move to cities to work, study or break free. Food isn’t on their minds. “It is ironic that they ignore the one thing that could give them a competitive edge in their jobs or work. The drive to get anywhere needs fuel,” says nutritionist Ishi Khosla.
Tewari learnt to cook and returned to his job. Now, a business analyst with a Mumbai-based firm, he still pops liver pills every day—the after-effects of jaundice. Like him, most youngsters are realising that they need to master a new skill — cooking for survival. This group of kitchen rookies are clubbed as Bachelor Cooks by a Delhi-based software engineer Anthony
Tongbram who went on to become a minor celebrity on the Net with his blog anthonyskitchen.blogspot.com. The blog is about “kickass recipes you can never go wrong with”. His Bachelor Cooking forum on Orkut has hundreds of members and counting. “I was reaching out to kids who hated cooking. I have simplified the recipes and use a chatty writing style with lots of smileys. There’s no gyaan about how many teaspoons of which exotic herb you have to use or how finely you have to slice the onions; just basic boiling and frying,” says Tongbram with the...
