India, March 7 -- 1You begin your book by sharing the pain of losing a loved one. How did the loss change the way you see yourself and your journey? Loss rearranges the furniture of the soul. It doesn't just take someone away; it alters the acoustics of your inner life. When you lose a parent, a partner, a pillar, you don't merely grieve a person - you grieve a version of yourself that existed in their gaze. In my case, grief stripped me of urgency and replaced it with attentiveness. I stopped racing toward outcomes and began listening to pauses. I became less interested in achievement as spectacle and more invested in presence as practice. Loss taught me that love is not proven by longevity alone, but by how deeply it changes the way you stand in the world after it's gone. The book doesn't begin with pain for drama, it begins there because everything honest that followed had to pass through that fire. Loss made me porous, and in that porosity, I found a quieter courage. 2Food carries history and culture. In your life, how has it shaped memory and connection? Food has always been my first language of love. Long before I learned how to articulate longing or loss, I learned how to feed it. A meal is a memory you can return to with your hands. In New York, food became survival as much as sustenance. When homesickness hit, and it often did, I cooked my way back to myself. I recreated flavours not for accuracy, but for anchoring. The act of cooking gave my loneliness a task. It turned exile into ritual, and nostalgia into nourishment. Food, for me, has been an archive and anchor. It carries the scent of my mother's kitchen, the echo of shared tables, the intimacy of cooking for someone you cannot yet name as family but who already is. It creates a place where stories sit down together, where differences soften, where time briefly behaves. In the book, food is never just nourishment. It is a witness. It remembers what we forget, and forgives what we fail to say. 3Professional kitchens have been criticised for their toxic masculinity. How have you navigated this? Professional kitchens are theatres of intensity - hierarchy sharpened by heat, urgency mistaken for authority, aggression often passed off as excellence. When I entered them, I quickly realised that toughness was expected but tenderness was treated with suspicion. I learnt early that I did not want to win by becoming someone else. I navigated kitchens by refusing to confuse cruelty with competence. That didn't always make things easy, but it made them honest. I chose consistency over intimidation, curiosity over bravado, and discipline over dominance. Being queer in that environment added another layer; you become hyper-aware of posture, tone. But it also gave me an advantage. I wasn't invested in performing masculinity; I was invested in building mastery. Over time, respect followed, not because I shouted the loudest, but because I stayed. The kitchen taught me that leadership doesn't need to bruise to be effective....