With the explosion of interest in novel cuisines and healthy eating, has food writing as a career come of age in India?

Interview by Anne John

Monica Geller of the TV show Friends is famously known for her interest in food and cooking. Here we have her namesake, who eats, cooks, writes as well as teaches about food! Meet the other food-enthusiast-Monica; Monica Bhide!

Anne John (AJ): Hi Monica! Your story of discovering cooking as a way to connect with people is touching. Over the years, how have you and your cooking evolved?

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Interview with Top 3 finalist at MasterChef Australia 2011, Alana Lowes who captured viewers with her spirit and talent in the kitchen.

Interview by Aparna V. Singh

Alana Lowes has many credits to her name – but the one which pushed her into the limelight and earned her loads of fans from all corners of the world, was ending up as a finalist on Masterchef Australia 2011. Here she speaks about her journey, passions and her future plans.

Aparna V.Singh (AVS): At the risk of sounding clichéd, how has the MasterChef journey been? How has reaching the top 3 changed your life?

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Travelling to exotic places and writing about them seems like a dream career; but what does it take to get going? 

Interview by Aparna V.Singh

A good travel writer’s words are like a magic carpet; they can transport us to new places and help us discover hidden delights or make us see well-known sights in an entirely new light. They serve as an extension to our senses and make us experience the flavours of destinations that we long to explore, someday.

Charukesi Ramadurai is a Bangalore-based travel blogger and freelance writer whose travel mantra is ‘anywhere but here’ – so when she is not actually travelling, she is busy planning her next trip. She blogs her travel stories on Itchy Feet. Charu talks to us about her passion and shares some pointers for anyone considering travel writing as a career option. More about her and her published work on her website. 

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Hetal Jannu and Anuja Balasubramanian, founders of Show Me The Curry, transport thousands of viewers from across the globe into their kitchens through their cookery shows on YouTube.

Interview by Anne John

Anne John (AJ): What was your ‘aha!’ moment that spurred you both onto the road to SMTC?

Hetal Jannu/Anuja Balasubramanian (HJ/AB): Filming cooking videos was Shrikant’s (Hetal’s husband) idea but the “aha!” moment came as soon as he mentioned it. Immediately, we both thought of family and friends who could benefit from such a service.

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Interview with Indrani Dasgupta and Sugandha Garg, co-hosts of What’s With Indian Men?, a travel show that decodes the man with his city.

By Amrita Rajan

Indrani Dasgupta has one of the most famous faces in India – the Lakme girl is in every magazine, on hoardings and television across the country. Sugandha Garg is the young actor who’s a part of New Bollywood, appearing in movies such as Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na and Tere Bin Laden to name a couple. Together, they host FOX History & Traveller’s original series, What’s With Indian Men, currently airing through July.

Amrita Rajan (AR): How did you come to be involved in What’s With Indian Men?

Indrani Dasgupta (ID): The channel called and asked me if I would be interested in doing the show. This show was different from everything I have been offered on TV. It sounded like a show I would watch, which was the tipping point.

Sugandha Garg (SG): I was approached by the channel to host the show. When I heard the name of the show, I had no doubt that I was doing it! We all want to know ‘What’s With Indian Men’!

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An interview with Batul Mukhtiar, among the small but growing number of Indian filmmakers making interesting documentaries on India.

By Amrita Rajan

India is rich soil for documentaries of all kinds – food, travel, politics, culture – and going by the programming schedule of channels like TLC and Discovery, these features are enormously popular with Indians. Strangely though, very few of them are actually made by Indians for an Indian audience.

Batul Mukhtiar (150 Seconds Ago, Lilkee and the forthcoming Kaphal) is a filmmaker, writer and blogger who has worked on a number of such documentaries in many roles. In this interview, she talks about her road to documentaries and the interesting experiences she has had, as well as on being a woman in the tough world of film-making.

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In this interview with Author, Gita Aravamudan, she discusses the challenges that working women face and how women are changing workplaces.

By Aparna V. Singh

Gita Aravamudan started her journalistic career in the 1960s when female journalists were still not common in India. Since then, her writing has been wide-ranging – from fiction to critiques on cinema. Of special interest to us, is her extensive writing on gender and women’s issues. In 2007, Penguin published her Disappearing Daughters, on female foeticide in India – a book that was received very well by readers and generated much discussion on the subject.

With her latest book, Unbound: Indian women at work, Gita again plunges into a subject very much on the minds of Indian women at present – the world of career, ambition, earning and the conflict with other roles that form a large part of their lives.

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From being a space tightly controlled by a few, publishing is becoming a much more democratic activity, thanks to the Internet.

By Aparna V. Singh

Given the costs of printing and a small subscriber base, most literary magazines in India, whether in English, Hindi or other languages have had it tough. Enter the new independents – who start their ventures online, where on shoestring budgets, they can still reach out to the right audience.

TheBanyanTrees (TBT) is one such online creative magazine that recently completed a year of publishing. We interviewed Nivethitha Kumar, part of the all-women founding team of TBT (her co-founders are Anuradha Chandrashekaran and Dhivya Arasappan) to discuss their journey in the literary world and the pleasures and pains of starting up.

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Interview with Ishita Srivastava, maker of documentary film, Desigirls, which deals with the experiences of South Asian queer women in New York.

By Aparna V. Singh

Ishita Srivastava grew up in New Delhi and very early on, was inspired by the power of the arts to effect social change. After completing her MA degree in Cinema Studies and Cultureand Media at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in May ‘09, Ishita left academia to explore her passion for making documentaries. She is interested in harnessing the power of non-fiction storytelling and exciting, new media forms to raise awareness about political, cultural and human rights issues. She currently lives in New York and works on the media team of a non-profit organization called Breakthrough that uses media tools to create awareness of human rights issues.

Desigirls is a documentary made by Ishita, on the experiences of queer women of South Asian origins/backgrounds, living in New York.

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Interview with Devika Bhagat, film and television screenwriter, who firmly believes in letting her ‘characters and their world’ guide her.  

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