Writer’s Corner: How a $1,000 coupon contest launched Shoba Narayan’s writing career

She adds, “If I had lived in another city like Delhi or Calcutta, would I have written about the city, definitely. Would I have written entire books? I am not so sure. I did not bargain for the fact that Bengaluru would influence me so much.”

Narayan remembers having a writing habit since childhood, which evolved into pitching and writing several articles for The Indian Express during the 1980s while she was a college student. Like many writers, Narayan adheres to certain habits in her writing, such as noting down interesting ideas in a diary and building on them when inspiration strikes, then converting them into polished articles when the time comes.

An element that has always been very strong in her books is culture and food, rooted in her time in New York as a postgraduate student in journalism at Columbia University.

Recalling her very first book, Monsoon Diary, she says, “The New York Times had announced a competition where you had to write 150 words about food, and the winner would get 1,000 dollars worth of restaurant coupons. I was a poor young student at the time, and the idea was very alluring. To my delight, I won.”

That 150-word essay was the beginning of what would become Monsoon Diary, which wound up being nominated for the prestigious James Beard Award.

Cuisine as a topic has also made it into all her works on Bengaluru to some extent, as well as being a central theme in Food and Faith, which features Narayan writing about various religious centres and places of worship from different faiths across the country, and the food that is served there, from temple prasadams to the food at langars and dargahs.

Currently, she is also researching to write a book on the history of food in Bengaluru, tracing it back to the reign of the city’s founder, Kempe Gowda.

On the topic of new writers tackling the topic of the city, Narayan says, “It is wonderful that Bangalore has become a city where a number of people are writing about it. There is a flowering of talent. I would tell them to mix their passion with the geography and history of Bangalore. If your passion is acting, look into the Kannada films and theatres… It is a triangle of interests: passion, location and history.”