What it takes to be a good cook!

Yesterday i watched the film "Cheeni Kum" and was probably fascinated at the way chefs were shown in this movie. Hence am inspired to blog it out.
Cooking is a very easy task yet a very uphill one for few. Some lucky people are trained from childhood to make good food and some learn it due to circumstances. I belong to the former group.
To my surprise, cooking was not just about putting the vessel on the stove, adding veggies and ingredients and eating it..... but i learnt with this film that there was something more serious to it as a profession and i learnt what exactly it is.... These are a few of my learnings.....
Should you study at a hotel management college in order to cook well ?
Well, it’s not absolutely necessary. Experience is the ultimate teacher. But education coupled with experience is even better. We regard our mother and grandmother to be the best cooks in the world. They havent studied anywhere but learning once and practising a 1000 times has made them experts. They learn the tricks of the trade in due course of time and are all set to impart their knowledge to youngsters. They know shortcuts, ways to reuse leftovers, tastier way of preparing food. Their efforts were time consuming but their concentration entirely lay on serving us the best dish. As far as anyone remembers, our mother and grandmother hardly resorted to shortcuts, processed food, ready to make foods etc to fill our stomachs. Their recipes were neatly designed and crafted from Square 1 at home. Be it tedious masala preparation, sambar rasam powders or even all those tasty snacks and sweets.
Today is the day of perfection. People are ready to spend that extra buck for a tasty morsel of food. Further, due to lack of time and interest, ready meals and pre-processed foods are in vogue. Everything comes prepared and ready. Just dip in water and eat...Thats the mantra. But how many of us take time to read the ingredients of such a packet and what it really contains apart from rice and cereals and food? Preservatives et al.
Anyways, since i am drifting away from my actual topic, let me come back and explain what my chef friend told me about their profession. I must say i was both awestruck and sympathising at the end of it. Schooling will give you a good platform from which to begin, and make you more hirable. But it is only the start.
Learning about a dish and making it once or twice in school is nothing compared to the person who’s done it 400 times, as I already wrote.
He says, a catering student (I will call him a chef ) won’t go from school to a position of sous chef directly. One has to do more than his/her share of "dirty work" first. Forget your homemade food and think standing on your feet for hours filling vegetables with masala, cleaning artichokes, peeling potatoes, chopping onions, mincing meat, dressing chicken, cutting salad artistically and being expected to perform these monotonous, mechanistic chores with assembly line speed and accuracy. :-) Well i just kind of sighed hearing this.
At the next level, the chef is responsible for making appetisers, soups, salads, cocktails and other preparations. How long the chef remains at this position depends on their skills and the restaurant's main speciality. If the place was famous for these preparations, ideally they would hire 5-6 such chefs of this level, known as being a line cook. Their work is also equally gruelling and consists of nonstop work until demand exists.
Once a line cook is too good, they become a sous-chef. This designation is known to many of us. Imagine what a sous chef might have gone through in order to become this in life. Hence a fresher out of catering school becoming a sous chef is an IMPOSSIBLE feat. A sous chef is a prestigious designation and their responsibilities just double up. Monitoring the line cooks, waiters, making sure dishes are rightly garnished, trying a hand at inventing something new, taking feedback from customers, a sous chef does it all with élan. Like all aspiring souls, a sous chef's ultimate goal is to become a executive chef. This is probably the highest position before one goes on to own their own restaurant. But my friend says, this transition from a sous chef to a exec chef is mixed with hardwork, sheer luck and also some backing. But this probably exists at every professional "that-last-step-to-success" level.
Neverthless, a chef's life never is a 8-hour job however high he is on the ladder.
And this is not just the only occupation for a catering institute pass out. There are other occupations like cooking school teachers, food stylists, caterers, and restaurant consultants to name a few. But inevitably, these people have spent years paying their dues in front of hot stoves when everybody else was out having fun or being with their family. If one is not interested in being any of these, they could still end up being Food writers. Remember all those articles and columns you read in newspapers, mags and websites and wondered who has the time for this.... Well thats a food writer for you ! You probably have a better chance of ending up on the Food Network than being able to support yourself, (let alone a family), by food writing alone. Let me not sound discouraging, but people now are smart to grasp this truth and everyone does their bit at multitasking to make ends meet. After all, at the end of the day, one measures success by not just money but also one's experience.
If i were to correlate it to the IT industry, it would be like a software engineer doing their job, coming back and writing technical papers, columns, coaching freshers etc. The same career path is spanned by catering professionals in order to make their lives worthwhile.
Finally, I dined at this restaurant at Hyderabad - Krsna Bistro, the brainchild of a sales guy who worked with TATA. He says he felt bored doing his job and since he was inclined to good dining, he thought why not open his own restaurant. And lo, he is now a proud owner of a very happening place.
And as Amitabh says in this film Cheeni Kum about the profession of cooking - Other art forms just draw the vision, hearing and touch senses whereas cooking attracts all the senses of a human being, the most important being taste.
Wish you good food! :_)