Reviewing "Chef's Table"

I've been watching two series on Netflix - Chef's Table and Chef's Table - France. They're absolutely a joy to watch.
 
I'm not a big fan of food and cooking shows in general but I've really loved these. Each episode here profiles one chef and his restaurant. Typically these are modern Western restaurants. 
One of the things with conventional cooking shows is that you always have to end up with someone tasting the food and having an orgasm over it. "The money shot" as it were, borrowing a phrase from a more disreputable genre (perhaps there's a deeper logic for the phrase food porn). I've always found this problematic, and I assume they are even more problematic for the show producers. How to keep producing expressions of food ecstacy that will convince viewers ?
 
Chef's Table completely eschews this. There is almost nil on-screen tasting. Quite a audacious attempt for a food show, and they pull it off amazingly.  They however do fantastic videography of the food that almost makes up for it. The reason it works is that the show covers the best modern restaurants, and modern western cooking lays great emphasis on how the food is presented.
 
The other approach they take is to make it a story about the chef rather than the food. These stories are so fascinating and so well-captured. 
 
There is the story of Italian chef Massimo Bottura who dragged Italian cuisine into the modern era and whose restaurant is rated among the best in the world. There are several great vignettes in the episode, but I'll have to be satisfied with recounting a couple of the lesser ones, since the others are not so amenable to description. 

One of his dishes got created out of a near-disaster when one of two lemon tarts being served got dropped. They saved the day by breaking the other tart in exactly the same way so that it seemed like it was done deliberately. That became one of the signature dishes, later disarmingly titled "Oops, I dropped the Lemon Tart". Not a story to tell to those who don't like nouvelle cuisine! Some other dish names: "A Potato Waiting to Become a Truffle", "An Eel Swimming Up the Po River".

There is an interesting side-story that makes a point about modern art. Massimo's wife takes him to an art exhibition where one of the wacky exhibits is a bunch of pigeons on the rafters. The idea is that pigeons are pooping on the other works of art and that artwork included  imitation droppings on some of the artworks. Massimo is completely taken by the idea, and decides that the only way he can break through the resistance and make his point about modernizing Italian cuisine is by going out of his way to figuratively poop on the cuisine classics until people get it. So that's what he goes on to do (very successfully) in his restaurant. Perhaps a story to recount to those who complain about the meaninglessness of modern art.


One of the most remarkable stories is Alain Passard's. He is a Paris chef who at the height of his glory (three Michelin stars), walks away from everything he has done so far, to start completely afresh and create a vegetarian cuisine, a heresy in his native France (Michelin continued to rate him three stars for the new work). He goes to the extent of running two farms to produce the vegetables that the restaurant uses.

I'm amazed at how the show manages to get inside the skin of the chefs.  American Dan Barber honestly reflects on screen about how much his work is driven by his drive to fill the void left by the death of his mother when he was four. Massimo Bottura authentically reflects in his darling Italian-accented English: "If you have success, and if you live an incredible moment of happiness, the happiness is much more deep and big if you share with others and get to the point together; is like the happiness and feeling is exploding. Its double. This is the point".

Alain Passard talks so movingly about the joy the work gives him.  "My only ambition is to love what I do more every day. Just the idea of a job well done, no outside projects, needs or dreams. If this story exists today, its because I love my job more than anything. This place (the farms), its a space for myself. Its marvelous. I find in it a phenomenal comfort. I find love, happiness, a well-being. I find things I can't find anywhere else. My gardens saved my life."
 
That Netflix is producing content of this quality suggests that besides acquiring content, they also want to produce Oscar or Emmy-worthy stuff themselves. More power.   

Below are teasers for the two shows. Several episodes are currently pirated on YouTube, you can easily find them. I've given links in case the embedded versions don't work.






https://www.youtube.com/Z-yY6RmF-iE
 
https://www.youtube.com/qKqj85oo2wI

Theorising change in India

I've been thinking to see if I can put together thoughts about how change could come about in India.There is a phrase that's become quite popular : 'theory of change'. So this is about theorising change in India.  

A series of articles I read recently on sand mining in Tamil Nadu offers an initial peg for exploring this. The first part of the three part article series is here, with links to the others:

http://scroll.in/article/815138/tamil-nadus-political-parties-are-making-money-from-sand-worth-a-whopping-rs-20000-crore-a-year


It explores the destructive practice of 'mining' of sand from river beds that is then used for construction. Sand mining is very bad for the groundwater, as the sand acts as a sponge to hold the river water and allow it to percolate into the ground. In the absence of sand this doesn't happen.

Observations:

Firstly the entire practice is driven by the huge amount of construction going on in TN and the rest of India. In the absence of sources elsewhere, the markets somehow find a way to access river sand. So the core push for illegal sand mining comes from economic development.

The third article does a useful analysis on how different organs of society have failed to address this practice. The political system is directly collusive in this practice, partly fuelled by the need for big money to finance election campaigns. Citizens have not been able to come together and oppose it, the courts have not been effective, and media has not gone beyond a point in investigating this. This is a useful lens in general to explore the functioning of society - these (markets, political system the citizens themselves, the judiciary) are key parts of society and how well they are functioning individually and collectively tells us about how society as a whole is doing.

Looking at the discussion there regarding the role of the media some points stand out. Important media channels are controlled by political parties. While you can understand that the media controlled by the ruling party will not do much, the article is less clear on why the opposition-controlled media doesn't either. Possibly because none of the parties want to kill the golden goose of sand mining. There is also a fairly rich independent media but mostly controlled by large corporate groups which don't have an incentive to go strongly after the government.  The Hindu stands out as as exception that has enough muscle to buck the trend but hasn't. However that fits into a pattern, for all its strengths, the Hindu has regrettably never had the guts to do really hard-hitting oppositional journalism.

A difficulty in this issue is the problem of 'attribution'. The connection between sand mining in a river bed and the reduction in groundwater levels in the areas around is not so clear-cut and intuitive. Further,  overextraction of water from bore wells is already leading to falling levels of groundwater and separating this and other effects from that due to sand mining is not so easy. So the public isn't as concerned about sand mining as it might otherwise be. 

So what might we say then in terms of how to create change? 
I don't have very promising ideas but here are some thoughts:

A background context to the entire dysfunctionality is the power of money and the threat of violence. These combine to prevent corrective action from taking place. In my mind, most analyses finally come down to money and the hold it has on the current human, and Indian mind. At a deep, root-cause-analysis level then, one has to address what people are willing to do, and not do, in the quest for money.

In general there is dysfunctionality in all the institutions and society at large, as described above. The final end state we want to arrive at is healthy institutions and a healthy society. Working on particular problems like sand mining should be done keeping this broader context and goal in mind. In this case the dysfunctionality of media seems to be the proximate solution most amenable to improvement. Putting a better environment for media like separation of political parties from media and preventing media businesses from being a part of larger corporate groups are some immediate ideas. More serious study should certainly be able to come up with good practical solutions for a more useful watchdog media. 

An angle that occurred to me is the Cauvery dispute. Practices like sand mining are irresponsible in terms of water conservation. Therefore they weaken the case of the Tamil Nadu government in arguing water scarcity. The courts and tribunals dealing with the matter could bring water conservation into the ambit of the argument. They could say that the quantum of water you get is partly determined by how conscientious you are in general about conserving water. After all, if you are profligate with whatever water you have, why should hotly contested waters be allocated to you ? Such an approach could well have enough impact that it could overcome the formidable political economy of sand mining in Tamil Nadu. Needless to say , it is not as if TN is the villain of the piece, there would also be wasteful practices that are being followed in Karnataka which that state should be held accountable for.

-----
PS: Back from a good trip to Timbuktu and leaving immediately to Priya's mother's place in Tamil Nadu. 

Publishing on a lighter schedule

After coming back from Singapore, I picked up the blogging habit again in August and September. There were lot of pent up things in my mind that I wanted to express on paper. I'm glad to have written about a significant number of things I wanted to express. I'm also seeing that a new set of post ideas are coming up and this doesn't seem to be a process that is going to end so soon. While writing as a full time occupation has its attractions, other things are now crowding the mindspace and the energy for blogging is not as much as before. Earlier , especially in August, I didn't feel like doing much at all and spent a week or two hardly going out, with blogging being the main activity. Now other interests are catching up and September has been very rich in meeting people and having good conversations about what they and I are up to. So, net net, I've decided to 'officially' close the heavy blogging phase. I do hope to sit down occasionally and write a substantive post atleast every two weeks, if not more frequently, for the next three months. Lets see how it goes. The next couple of weeks I'm planning to travel to Timbuktu and then Priya's native village in Tamil Nadu. These should provide material for posts but also may not actually have time or connectivity to do much writing and posting for the next couple of weeks. 

For those who have been tuning in the past couple of months - thanks for reading! 

Angkor photos

Just a few 

Tips on visiting Angkor: http://despoki.blogspot.in/2016/07/my-travel-guide-to-angkor.html