I want to be honest about why I started cooking. Not the version I would tell at a dinner party — the true version. The true version is less flattering and more interesting, and it goes like this: I started cooking because I wanted people to pay attention to me. The food was the method. The audience was the point.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start with the fried rice.
Koramangala in the early 1990s was changing. This was Bangalore before Bangalore became the thing it became — before the tech campuses and the traffic and the transformation into a city that had outgrown its memory of itself. The BDA complex where I lived was a particular kind of world: known, contained, predictable in the way that neighbourhoods are when everyone in them is roughly living the same life. We knew our neighbours. We knew the sounds of each other's evenings. We knew, more or less, what was expected of everyone.
And then, at the edges of that world, new things started appearing.
Restaurants. A different kind from what we knew. Places that served something approximating Chinese food — fried rice with soy sauce, dishes that tasted faintly of elsewhere, of a world that was beginning to become more accessible even if it wasn't yet fully arrived. These places carried the particular glamour of things that are new and slightly out of reach. Going out to eat at them was an occasion. Going often was not practical — the cost added up, and in any case, not everyone in the family wanted to. There was always someone for whom the familiar was sufficient. I was not that person. I was hungry for things I hadn't tasted yet.
So I watched.
There was a vegetarian restaurant in the complex. One afternoon I went there and I watched the cook make fried rice. Not with any plan. Just watching, the way you watch something that interests you before you know what you intend to do with it.
He put oil in the wok. High heat. Vegetables going in, moving fast. Then the soy sauce — a confident splash, not a measured pour, the liquid hitting hot metal with a sound that meant something was transforming. Then vinegar. Pepper. The whole thing assembled in minutes, plated, handed across the counter.
I bought a portion. Took it home. Ate it slowly, paying attention in a different way now — not just tasting but reverse-engineering, trying to understand the sequence of decisions that had produced what was in the bowl. It was not remarkable food. But it was hot and it was different and it tasted like the direction I wanted to go.
And somewhere between the first forkful and the last, I had the thought that would turn out to be one of the more consequential of my young life:
I think I can do this at home.
We bought the ingredients. Soy sauce. Vinegar. Vegetables. And I added something the restaurant hadn't used: eggs. My version, not a copy. The first departure from the original — already a small act of ownership over the thing I was learning.
The fried rice I made that first time was not sophisticated. It was the effort of a boy in 9th standard who had watched something once and was attempting to reconstruct it from memory and instinct. But it was hot and it smelled right and it tasted — genuinely tasted — of something made with intention.
And then people came over.
This is the part of the story I want to be precise about, because the precision is what makes it true rather than merely flattering. It wasn't family that I needed to impress — family is obligated to be supportive, and their approval, while warm, carries a different weight. It was the guests. My mother and father's friends who came by and happened to eat what I had made. My sister's friends, who were older and therefore not required to find anything I did interesting. These were people with no reason to pay attention to a boy in 9th standard standing in a kitchen with a wok and some soy sauce.
They paid attention.
There is a very specific quality to the moment when someone who had no particular expectation of you pauses mid-bite and asks: who made this? It is not the same as a compliment. It is something closer to recognition — the acknowledgement that something real happened here, that someone made a decision and it worked, that the thing on the plate is not an accident.
I heard that question for the first time in our Koramangala kitchen, and something in me understood, without having language for it yet, that this was a currency I could earn more of.
"Beat It" was playing somewhere that year. It was always playing somewhere that year — Michael Jackson in the background of everything, on cassettes passed between friends, leaking out of shops and autorickshaws and the living rooms of the BDA complex. But I think about "Beat It" specifically in relation to this period of my life, because it is not a song about celebration. It is a song about proving something. About walking into a situation and coming out the other side having changed the terms. The guitar solo doesn't arrive like a reward — it arrives like a consequence. You did the work, you held your ground, and here is what that sounds like.
That is what a kitchen felt like to me at fifteen. Not a domestic space. A proving ground.
I want to say something about why this memory matters beyond the food, because I think the deeper thing is worth naming plainly.
I was not obviously impressive at that age. I was curious and interested in everything and therefore not singularly excellent at any one thing in the visible way that produces easy recognition. But in a kitchen, making something that none of the guests had expected from a boy my age — I was suddenly the person people were talking about. Not because I had demanded attention. Because I had earned it by making something real.
I have spent the years since building things in different kitchens. Platforms, strategies, campaigns, systems — none of them made of soy sauce and eggs, but all of them made with the same underlying intention: to combine ingredients in a way that makes the room lean forward. To make something that produces that particular quality of attention which cannot be manufactured or performed, only earned.
The guests at my parents' home in Koramangala were the first audience I ever had for anything I created.
I have been cooking for an audience ever since.