About Me

SOURISH BHATTACHARYYA

Op-Ed Columnist (Mail Today)

Blogger (Indian Restaurant Spy)

Co-Founder, Tasting India Symposium (www.tastingindiasymposium)

And a Gandhi researcher

People earn to eat; I eat for a living. A New Delhi-based food columnist and blogger, and a newspaper journalist with 34 years behind me, I was the Executive Editor of Mail Today (India Today Group) for seven years when I decided to go solo in 2013.

This freedom from the exacting routine of daily newspaper journalism -- and the drudgery of editing other people's copy -- gave me the time and energy to write and ideate. Fortune Cookie, my Op-Ed column for Mail Today, an India Today Group daily newspaper, is now in its 11th year without a break. Tasting India Symposium, a global symposium on sustainable food cultures and gastronomic tourism, which I have co-founded, is heading towards its third round (December 13-18, 2018 -- I'll alert you when our website, www.tastingindiasymposium.com, is updated). And the Asian Hawkers Market, India's only public food festival dedicated to Asian cuisines, of which I am a Founder Director, is all set for its sixth edition (November 23-25, 2018).

In the past five years, I have also co-founded the Delhi Gourmet Club and signature food and beverage events such as the Top Chef Awards, India Wine Awards / delWine Excellence Awards, and Indian Wedding Travel Mart. Also, in the recent past, I have contributed to BBC Good Food, TimeOut and Man's World; the magazines of The Oberoi and The Leela hotels; BW Businessworld magazine's B2B publication for the hospitality industry, BW Hotelier; and the Mumbai Mirror.

Previously, I have served as the Editor of HT City (the lifestyle daily of the Hindustan Times) and the National Features Editor of The Indian Express. I have also had the distinction of being the first Indian to write a book on Japanese Cuisine -- Sakura's Kitchen: The Cuisine and Culture of Japan (2005). And most recently, I have taken on the additional role of Founder Secretary, Young Chefs Association for Sustainable India. We get one life, let's make the best use of it.

That brings me to Gandhi. When I was a grad student in America (Ohio University, Athens, Ohio), I developed a fascination for the Mahatma's philosophy of journalism (after all, he spoke mainly through the three newspapers he ran in different phases of his life). As I meandered through journalism, I lost track of the great man, till I got an opportunity to review Joseph Lelyveld's Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India.

The references to the Mahatma's allegedly homoerotic relationship with Hermann Kallenbach led me back to Gandhi's life and re-discover his continuing obsession with dietetics as a serial faddist, vegetarian pamphleteer and food vision -- we owe much of our understanding of a sustainable food culture to people who grasped his understanding of food ecology. Along the way, I stumbled upon incidents in his life that I believe have a message for us in this troubled world. Mahatma Gandhi used to maintain that his life was his message. There is an everlasting truth -- like everything else he said or did -- in this statement of his. A truth that is timeless. For Gandhi is timeless for the generations that will look up to him in times of despair and despondency.