reading habit
Editor’s note
Sonal Ved is the content director at India Food Network and Tastemade India (where she also hosts cooking shows), and the food editor at Vogue India. Her second cookbook, ‘Tiffin’, was a New York Times must-have cookbook for Fall 2018. Her words have appeared in food publications such as Food52 and Thrillist.
What is your most powerful and/or cherished childhood memory of a book?
Definitely the day my cousin Archana literally threw a tattered copy of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ at me. She said it’d change my life. And boy, it did. This was the first time I read a book that made me understand the power of storytelling. I was so engrossed in Harry’s world, I wanted it to be real. I am still hoping/waiting for my letter from Hogwarts!
<Threw it at you? Well, that’s one way to leave a lasting impression.>
What line of literature or poetry can you quote ad nauseam? Brownie points if you can tell us when and where you quoted it most recently.
Robert Frost’s ‘Miles to Go Before I Sleep’ (‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’), and I LOVE Kabir’s dohas.
Frost’s poem comes to my mind often when I feel like “let me take a break after this project”, but I am truly never able to do it.
I first heard Kabir’s dohas at the Kabir Fest in Mumbai, and my favourite is:
Dheere-dheere re mana, dheere sab kuchh hoy,
Maalee seenche sau ghada, ritu aae phal hoy.
It’s a doha on the virtue of patience.
<Wait, is there anyone who doesn’t know that Frost poem by heart?>
An author you adored as a child but haven’t thought about in years?
Charles Dickens. I had to literally mug up ‘A Christmas Carol’ when I was in school. I was playing Ebenezer Scrooge in our annual play. It’s because the dialogues were long and dramatic and I was the only one who was so into Dickens’ writing, I did it effortlessly.
<Our schooling was more Shakespearean—blood, betrayal and assassinations—and in language none of us understood.>
Which book would you gift to your new best friend, and which to your worst enemy?
To a best friend: ‘In Bibi's Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean’. The recipes are beautiful, the story is strong, it’s about a whole new culture and I think anyone who loves cooking will appreciate it.
For my worst enemy: A trigonometry textbook. Another beautiful day goes by and we’ve still never used a single formula.
<Umm, that’s certainly different… and creative.>
I would love to see a movie/series adaptation of ___________ starring ____ as _____
‘The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse’ by Charlie Mackesy. Eddie Murphy should definitely be one of the characters.
<Perfect, since he can already talk to animals.>
Which book do you pretend to have read?
Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens’. It’s extremely interesting, but I’ve not got a chance to finish it. I do intend to finish it though. There, I pretended again to have read it halfway.
<We see what you did there 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽>
What’s one of the funniest books you’ve ever read? Something apart from Wodehouse, Adams, Durrell et al would be even better.
Mindy Kaling’s ‘Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?’ Her work is strong, witty, funny and is tremendously relevant to women of colour. (I’ve liked her TV work too, and the Indian-American girl on ‘Never Have I Ever’ is a very relatable creation).
<Kaling is the prophet of our times. A chapter in her 2011 book is titled ‘There Has Ceased to be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes and My Asleep Clothes’. See? Nostredamus!>
Send us a photo of your tsundoku pile.
It’s mostly a huge box filled with cookbooks I am yet to cook from. In the last two years, I have only read history books as part of research for my book ‘Whose Samosa Is It Anyway?’ But now that’s done, I hope I am able to give these gorgeous books some time.
<Hmm, a box of cookbooks… and left unused and unseen? Sad, sad, sad.>
Thanks for playing, Sonal! Be sure to check out her excellent new book on the history of Indian food titled ‘Whose Samosa Is It Anyway?’