There have been a couple of things that I’ve been doing for the past few days apart from writing – being sick and watching Shokugeki no Soma. The former is thanks to the cold I seem to have caught due to another season change (a round of applause for my immunity, please!) and the latter is due to my latent interest in food being cooked.
As countless food blogs and bloggers must have already informed you umpteen times, cooking is an art. I, personally, derive pleasure in observing that art. I know, most people who perceive it as an art would rather enjoy performing it – so do I – but for me, watching the art being performed brings a greater sense of fulfilment.
This habit/trait goes back to a time when TLC was still TLC and not Travel and Living Channel. During lunches at home in high school, I used to almost exclusively watch cooking shows (except Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern). This habit, when I carried it to my dorm, raised a lot of eyebrows and groans of displeasure. According to most of my dorm-mates, the amazing culinary spreads being cooked up on the screen would make them lose their appetite for whatever drab meal had been served by our dorm-owner that day ( and trust me, you DEFINITELY needed an appetite to have that). It worked differently for me – it made me feel more hungry, and finish my food faster, often eating up more than what I usually do. It worked the same way when I was suffering from dengue last year and had completely lost my appetite. The moment I switched on cooking shows on the TV, even the hospital food (which was decent, to be fair) went down with ease.
Which brings me to my current predicament. I caught a cold about a week ago. A little time before that, I started watching this recently popular anime, Shokugeki no Soma (my definition of recent anime is anything that came out after it became legal for me to vote) whose plot, without being too spoiler-y here, can be summarised as the story of a guy on a journey to evolve as a cook at an elite culinary school. Before we proceed any further, let me be clear to all non-otakus, this is an anime, and it has its fair share of fanservice, which is to anime what item songs (and currently, old-Bollywood remakes) are to Bollywood movies. So if you have a problem with that, limit your interest in Shokugeki no Soma to this article itself. But if you’re still interested, this is why I watch the anime (from 2:04 onwards)
I know I know, anime can be over-dramatic at times. Well, most of the times with popular shonen ones. But what is more important here is how the art of cooking has been portrayed as something cool, something awesome, something that’ll downright make people want to get up and cook!
And it did the same to me. The cold I’d caught peaked in its symptoms about a day before yesterday. And since I’ve done a Ph.D. in CatchingACold’ology, I could safely tell that it’s not going anywhere within the next couple of days. I literally did not feel like doing anything but lying down all day and succumb to the symptoms, letting the cold win. But during that time, watching a couple of episodes of Shokugeki no Soma, with extravagant cooking ideas being executed with inordinate skill all the time on screen, it felt like it was worth a shot. I found myself cooking all my meals, not only with a compulsion to eat at home but to make something cool, something worth showing-off, something more than a usual eat-at-home meal. Not that I succeeded, of course, or this would be a food blog by now. But there was one thing that definitely stuck during that experience.
Having something to do while you’re in the worst shape, physical or mental, something that you’re quite passionate about can really go a long way in bringing you out of wherever you are and showing you what you are capable of if you’re just willing to get up and do it. It doesn’t have to be your primary passion or your goal in life. You don’t have to be really good at it. For me, that primary goal is writing. But to actually be able to write, I have to get up, freshen up, take everything in, broaden my mind, feel the energy and a ton of other things that would’ve definitely not happened if I clung to the bed with the cold as an excuse. Cooking did that for me. It brought me to space where I could see that if I wanted to beat it, the cold was nothing more than an excuse, to begin with.
You might be in a worse situation than I am, or in a relatively different one. Whatever might be the case, I would encourage you to find something, something that keeps the wheels turning and the fire burning. That something might not give you the answer to the questions you have in your life right now, but it might just give you the means to discover it yourself.
Arnab Mukherjee 