Legacy: Letters from eminent parents to their daughters (23 page)

Dear Kannamma, I look forward to seeing you attain the success that you want in the field of your choosing. I am proud that someone as young as you has chosen to follow a calling that is so mature for her age. And I wait for the day when you will use your training in Education and Psychology, to make life more meaningful and joyful for those with psychological and emotional disabilities.

In the end, I want to tell you that at no point of time during my journey have I had a sense of burden for all the things I have done for my family. I have enjoyed every moment of this tumultuous journey because I have had the blessing of your company. You owe me nothing but your own happiness at all times.

Love,
Ma

Sanjeev Kapoor

ndia’s culinary maestro, Sanjeev Kapoor, is neither a Michelin-star chef nor has he been hatted—both honours considered to be the highest form of recognition for any chef in the world. In fact, Kapoor makes for the most unlikely chef. He started out in life wanting to be an architect but decided to take up hotel management instead after he failed to make the cut for admissions to the architectural college he had applied to.

That did not, in any way, stop the determined, talented, and perfection-seeking young man from putting every ounce of his soul into his work. Like his father who taught him that knowledge is the key to being the best in your chosen profession, Kapoor has gone about the past few decades learning everything he can about the smallest part of the food business. Kapoor was and continues to be a fearless risk-taker. A few years into his marriage and career as an Executive Chef at a five-star hotel, Kapoor walked away from the job because he felt he was meant for better things in life. What followed was a period of uncertainty before finally landing the television show, Khana Khazaana, the longest-running food show in Asia which turned him into a household name. Homemakers swore by the perfection of his recipes, and where they were earlier usually content with cooking the usual dal, chawal, roti, and subzi, they started experimenting with other forms of food, dishing out pastas, pizzas, fajitas and enchiladas, tapas and tostadas.

Kapoor is the lone ranger who took the path less travelled and discovered the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In 2011, he launched FoodFood, his own 24-hour food channel, a feat that only a handful of chefs around the world have been able to pull off. Kapoor’s business now includes everything from restaurants and modular kitchens to ready-to-eat meals and kitchen equipment. He writes a letter garnished with love and concern for his two daughters.

Dear Rachita and Kriti,

It has always been my policy not to tell you what to do but to let you learn, instead, from what you see around you. I am hoping you will treat this letter less as a lecture and more as a glimpse into the stuff that has resulted in me becoming the person I am today and the father to two incredibly loving daughters.

If I were to look back over the years and to put my finger on the two or three beliefs that have helped me shape my own destiny, it would be the courage to be different, the willingness to take risks, the ability to have complete belief in yourself and above all, the motivation to work so hard that you become the expert in the space that you have chosen as your calling.

You are young now and on the threshold of a life that will take you along various paths, some smooth, others rough, and many a times the journey will be solitary. But what will come of help to you at such times, as it did for me, is the faith that if you are clear about where you are headed, the way ahead will open up for you. It might take some time but in the end, the path will clear up and you will reach where you always wanted to. The road that will take you to your goal, whatever and wherever it might be, is often not the road that the rest of the world will necessarily trod on, but if you know in your heart that it is the right path for you, take it, nevertheless.

I first realized the importance of standing your own ground at the age of 13, when my father’s bank job took us to the capital city of Delhi. My education till then had been at various convent schools across the country where his transferable job took us. And, my stints at these seemingly sophisticated schools had taught me a couple of things about education, including the fact that our schools, sadly, didn’t necessarily have the best teachers because our system did not encourage the best students to follow a career in teaching. I knew even at that point that our most important learning comes from the values and the practices that we pick up at home from our parents and elders. It may not qualify as ‘structured’ education in the conventional sense, but it impacts and influences us so much that there are chances of not forgetting those lessons in our lifetime.

Which is why, in Delhi, I decided that instead of undertaking a long commute to a reputed convent school, I would enroll myself in a government-run school near our house. My decision surprised my family but I stuck to it, pointing out that the education would be in English and I would also have the luxury of a swimming pool in the campus because this was one of the ‘model schools’ that the government was setting up. I never used the pool at school ever though!

Barely had I overcome the first hurdle when I ran headlong into a second, more formidable one. The school offered Sanskrit as an optional language and I decided I wanted to study the language since it would help me score much more than other languages. I had an obsession at that point about being the best in everything I did and scoring well in this language was in line with my strategy. Only, the school refused to allow me to take up that subject because I was the only student who wanted to learn it. When they failed to dissuade me, they summoned my parents and spoke to them about talking me out of it, but I stuck to my guns and simply pointed out that the school had a Sanskrit teacher and it was rule-bound to teach me the language if I wanted to. Eventually they gave in, I got my Sanskrit language training, and went on to score a lot of marks. That one event taught me the lesson that if you believe in something, don’t give up or back down just because popular opinion goes against you.

A few years ago, when I first wanted to start my 24-hour food channel, it caused quite a stir because it was something unheard of in India. My friends and colleagues in the industry, heads of other television channels laughed at me saying an ordinary chef had never managed to pull off such an audacious dream anywhere in the world. I would never be able to generate the humungous amount of money that would be required to fund such a project, they warned me. I refused to let the cynicism dampen my spirits and when the large industry heavyweights refused to buy into my idea, I got down to work silently, applying for a license, learning everything that I could about satellite television, the business model, and other technicalities. In the end, I started my own 24-hour food channel, FoodFood, and even if it was delayed—dreams often take time to become reality—I proved that a chef can, in fact, own his own television channel.

Belief has nothing to do with money. With money you may get the arrogance, but it won’t make your belief come true. Belief is a state of mind that tells you that you can do it.

My number one rule for my life has been to think differently and go after something that I want, with the belief that I can do it.

If you are willing to take risks, things will work out. Of course, you have to have your basics right and know your subject completely. Most people are bright, intelligent, hard working, but that is not enough. You need to be smart enough to enable yourself to visualize things for a longer term, be different, and then let destiny work its magic.

Prove your expertize and chase your goal till the very end. Starting with no money in my pocket but a bagful of dreams, I now have my own channel. In three years’ time, I will spend close to Rs 200 crores on it. The wonderful thing is that not all of this money is my own. The very people who did not believe in me initially are today willing to bet their money on my idea!

Years ago, before I even launched my first book, I launched my recipes on a CD at a time when our computers did not even have CD-ROM drives. My website sanjeevkapoor. com was up and running when large media houses did not have their own websites. My motto even today is to dream big and only then will the dream turn into a reality.

I see so many young, talented people not reach the heights that they could have because they are scared of taking a different path and choose to stick with the old, the tried, and the tested.

When I finished graduation and had to make a career choice, I decided to do a degree in architecture. I was a young, overconfident boy then and only applied for a seat at a nearby college, believing that they would definitely give me a seat. To my horror, I did not cut it in the first attempt and my name was put on the college’s waiting list. A close friend then introduced me to the idea of a hotel management degree and even though I had no interest in it—in my head, a chef was a mere cook then and not the glamorous being he is looked as today—I decided to appear for an interview for a lark. To my surprise, I cleared the interview and days later, I got a call from the architecture college as well saying a seat was now available for me there! It was a friend’s father who finally helped me decide on following the hotel management degree. ‘It is better to excel in a mediocre field than be mediocre in an excellent field,’ he told me.

At the end of my three-year course when it was time for placements for the management training programme at the government-run ITDC hotel, the selection panel suggested that I follow a career in kitchen management instead of absorbing me for a hotel management placement. I was furious and accused them of discriminating against me because I came without ‘connections’. The senior most member of the selection panel managed to convince me that I would have a place in hotel management if I so wanted. He told me that I was very good with the kitchen and food side of the business and told me to go home and think about it before I made my choice. By the time I went back to him the next day, my mind was clear and I had decided to take his suggestion and adopt the kitchen and food space as my career. Looking back, I like to think that I made the right decision. I truly believe that if you have the guts to stand out in a crowd, the chances of your standing out in life are much higher.

Kriti, you have your mind set on being a professional runner and have been following that passion for years now. Sometimes I am worried about you because this is a career that will be fraught with hurdles, one in which the chances of success are way limited than other spheres, simply because of the way sports is perceived in our country. But having followed my own dreams without heeding popular opinion and without always looking at the practical side of things, I want you to pursue your dream till the very end. Become the best runner that this country has produced.

Years ago, when I quit my job as Executive Chef at the Centaur hotel in Mumbai, your mother and I had no house of our own and had less than a lakh between us. But I quit because I was convinced I was meant for better things in life. I was working for nearly eighteen hours a day and was getting nowhere fast. I was looking at master chefs who had taken twenty years of slogging to get to that post and I was determined to not go down that route. Luckily, my tryst with television took off around that time and that too because I managed to convince the bosses at Zee TV that their food show would have much more potential if they called it ‘Khana Khazana’ instead of ‘Sreeman Baawarchi.’ I used my management education and my marketing skills to convince them and by the end of it, they were so sold on my idea and my ease with television as a medium, that I became the face of the by-now longest-running food program on television in India. What worked for me is the fact that I was a good teacher and I decided to use the show to teach viewers what they wanted to know instead of simply having me show off my skills. If they failed in their kitchen with my recipes, I would fail too and so I began with simple recipes such as the humble lassi that would make them succeed. That simple formula clicked and made me a household name in Indian homes and ever since then, my strategy has been to never set up my team for failure by giving them responsibilities that they are not equipped to handle.