Finding a perfect Recipe

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 8 December 2012   I am a lucky wife because I have a husband who makes my morning tea on the weekends. That just means two days of tolerating a concoction that he has fondly labeled garma garam chai (piping hot tea). Truth be told, he has never got it right despite all my efforts to teach him the recipe; yet every time he asks me to comment, I exclaim, “Super!” He smiles thankfully knowing that I have lied yet again. The only thing he hasn’t ever figured out is whether I lied out of obligation or love. This charade between us has gone on for years now, even as he asks me, “What exactly do you do that I don’t to make it so well?” I want to shrug and say “I don’t know,” but I cock a brow and say airily, “extra love, perhaps.” I have never tried to master the art of cooking, thanks to the undemanding palates of my family. Like many other skills that I possess only in passable degrees, I have just got by with my culinary capabilities. With no fixed methods, it has always been a little bit of this and a little bit of that going into the pot, with the result that I turn up different versions of the same dish on different occasions. Mind you, they have not always been as delectable as I would have liked them to be. I am as clueless about a lip-smacking outcome as I am of a disaster — no credit to the cook or blame on the book for either. I have often seen cookery as a parallel to life, especially when taken within the constructs of success and failure. Mitt Romney must have spilled as much man-hours and money on the campaign trail as Obama, yet the outcome we had on the election day would see the former spend a life time contemplating on what went wrong. There was something missing in his recipe that he would be at pains to fathom. Obama, for his part, would still be wondering through his worry-tinted smile how he got those ticks in the electoral boxes. Ask anyone who has won life’s grand slams and he would rattle off platitudes likes persistence and planning as the stilts that raised him to glory. A discerning few mention grace as the catalyst. A team at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, recently claimed to have cracked the code to achieving box office success for Bollywood films. It beats me to think that one can win handsomely with some smart number crunching alone. If only success was so easy to compute and arrive at, if only it was math and not a matter of how the dice fell, many of us would have been bestselling authors or screen scorching stars or globe-trotting entrepreneurs. While it is within everyone’s individual capacity to slog and stretch one’s limits, the abstract ingredient that we call ‘luck’ is something that one doesn’t find in recipe books and road maps to success. It is something that plops into our cooking pan and makes even the humble porridge a contest winner. It certainly helps to take tips from the experts and add value to our methods, but eventually we make our own dish with a unique taste of its own. It is nearly impossible to say what makes some enterprises so wholesomely successful although one can ascribe several variables to it; just as it is impossible to say what makes my tea taste better than the one my husband makes, although I can claim a dozen things, including the love ingredient. The truth of the matter is that there is no perfect recipe — either to cooking porridge or brewing tea or crafting success. We all follow our own recipes to make our meal and in that lies the relish.