Hardly ever spoken to a man of ambition and range as deeply inspiring as master-chef Khanna who turned feature filmmaker at 50
Vikas Khanna is the only one to meaningfully draw an analogy between movies and cooking, because he’s probably the only master-chef in the world to have masterfully dabbled in both. File pic
Consider the opening of a restaurant as a screenplay. To execute it, you hire two sets of staff. First, front of the house, that’s hostesses, sommelier, etc, who are no different from actors before camera. Back of the house involves people you can’t see, but they do the work of procuring produce, housekeeping, chefs cooking dishes — no different from technicians in a film.
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When the head of the kitchen commands, “Fire,” it is “action” for a movie set. A single dish is composed of multiple dishes — a minimum three each, which has taken months to reach your table. But you could pick up fish from Tokyo or truffles from France, the temperature at which you stop the simmering in the pan is the editing. It’s the most crucial part, as with pictures.
There you go: running a restaurant is like filmmaking, as the Michelin starred chef Vikas Khanna describes it to me, over a couple of conversations I’ve had with him ever since I watched his deeply humane/empathetic directorial debut The Last Colour, starring among others Neena Gupta, that dropped on Amazon Prime Video recently.
Khanna is the only one to meaningfully draw an analogy between movies and cooking, because he’s probably the only master-chef in the world to have masterfully dabbled in both. It’s like actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui now entering culinary arts, Khanna uses another analogy!
The first time I heard about his film I automatically assumed it would be about food — like, say, the brilliant Om Puri, Helen Mirren starrer One Hundred Foot Journey. Which in fact is a movie that Khanna hates with utmost rage, for its normalised racism.
In that Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg co-production, a desi must work/train under goras and kill it with French cuisine, in order to earn the Michelin Star. Rather than achieve the same with Indian food, as Khanna did, becoming one of the first persons of colour in the US to be crowned thus.
The off-stream Last Colour, on the other hand, is all about Banaras, following the story of three dispossessed characters from the margins — a widow, an untouchable street-kid, and a transgender. Shyam Benegal, Khanna says, praised him for extracting Gupta’s career-best performance.
Likewise, director Anurag Kashyap, who saw the film’s climax portions in New York, lauded Khanna for the fact that he doesn’t fall into the trap of template shots/filmmaking, which often happens with more formally trained directors.
What is Khanna’s own association with cinema? Don’t know how much of it counts, but as a child he used to deliver videotapes for a rental library his father ran in Amritsar. If he had three hours left to live, he’d use two hours 22 minutes of it to still re-watch Shawshank Redemption, which indicates his passion for films, and also teaches him a valuable lesson to rise, so he can take everyone else along with him!
He lives in New York, which in many ways is still America’s capital of independent cinema. He also trained as a chef in Bombay at the Sea Rock Hotel, which would’ve now been opposite Shah Rukh Khan’s bungalow; it got destroyed in the 1993 blasts.
He quit that job to skip the lockdown during the 1992 riots, and was saved from a Muslim mob by a Muslim couple he now calls his Abbu and Ammi, keeping a day of roza for them every year. And he’s written 42 books, one of which was The Last Colour!
In fact, everything about Khanna seems to deal with big numbers. He says he’s currently working on 63 different projects, all of which are under wraps. During the pandemic, he ran a food-distribution drive, sitting in New York, touching the lives of over 50 million Indians. Gordon Ramsey, another god of kitchen, says Khanna is the only global master-chef whose next step you cannot predict.
He moved to the US at 30, making his foray into feature films at 50, which inevitably opens you to a barrage of both praise and criticism. On this aspect he’s very clear - you’ve got to decide whether you want to be on stage, or in the audience! Also, as his grandmom told him, “Don’t wear [heavy] crown on your head, you’ll break your back.” Meaning, move on.
So much of Khanna’s life seems to emanate from prejudices meted out on the basis of people’s pigmentation. There seems an innate desire to prove them wrong. The reason he wouldn’t write an autobiography is because there are too many dark chapters, involving detractors: “Mat pooch unn parda nasheenon ke naam.”
Like that gora chef who told him, while he was researching for a book, that no matter what, the white man would get paid 10 times more for what he was doing. Khanna says this is anyway true for white executive chefs brought in to work in Dubai. He learnt that applied to publishing too.
So what’s the difference between kitchen and cinema, I ask Khanna. One, you can’t just eat at a restaurant as and when you like. A movie is accessibly immortal. But you can rework a dish, a film (like a book) once out, allows for no retakes. Glad to note he doesn’t need any of that for his first feature.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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