When we don’t follow fads

Accolades and beauty come and go, but what makes us happy is staying true to ourselves

It's when we become one with the pulse of the planet that our strongest dreams come true (Credit: Suvir Saran)

Growing up in India, travelling to cities large and small, to rural and urban outposts of the country, it was the flora and fauna that most captivated me. In them I saw beings that didn’t judge me but accepted me for who I was. Their well-being became my chief concern as a young boy. No surprise to family and friends then that I ran what to my juvenile brain seemed a home veterinary clinic, using a simple first-aid kit, scotch tape, dressings and ointments to clean, stitch, plaster and do minor surgeries on birds and small critters, many of whom survived my madness and were set free to be one with the world again. As I cared for the birds in cages and critters in shoe boxes, I would dream about becoming a veterinarian or a doctor and using my skills to heal.

Music also played an important role in our home when I was young. The passing of my grandfather was made easier because of the music my grand-aunt Pramila Bhatnagar filled our home with. I sang at school, helped lead the morning prayer during our daily assembly, participated in competitions, and sang for All India Radio. I began to wonder if music and performing was my true calling.

When I wasn’t singing, it was the visual arts that kept me busy. Sabiha Hashmi, the senior art teacher at Modern School, Vasant Vihar, became my guide to the world of visual artistry. I would bunk classes — not to do things youngsters did when being naughty — but to draw, paint, sculpt, etch, and screen print. I started dreaming of a life in the visual arts, after school and put to rest my dreams of being a famous singer, vet or doctor.

And so I headed to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. I studied full time, worked full time, and cooked and partied full time. Each night in my apartment in New York City, I entertained friends, strangers and relatives. My cooking, mostly the home cooking of India in the early years, made me a popular host, which led me to become a caterer and cooking teacher. I was featured in the pages of dailies and on the cover of NY Magazine. Retail and food became my new calling, and together kept me afloat and entertained.

It wasn’t long after that I began my life as a caterer and chef. The top hostesses of the city yearned for my food, and each one helped me hone my culinary skills and brought me to the homes of people who were trailblazers of fashion and style, stalwarts of industry, and the puppeteers of life in Manhattan and the world at large. Catering took me across the US and even outside its shores. Super models, actors and actresses, bankers and librarians and everyday people – these made up the rosters of my students. My culinary skills — and my three cookbooks — were praised by myriad magazines, newspapers, and podcasts. I made countless appearances on radio and TV.

But the more fame, success, and notoriety came my way, the more aware I became of how hollow my achievements were and how I hadn’t gotten any closer to my innermost dreams of who I was, wanted to be, and where I wanted my life to end. Smiles and chatter, celebrations, and red-carpet affairs — these made up the veneer that everyone saw and knew me for, but deep inside I still felt like the schoolboy who questioned his place and what he should do with his life.

Then I got sick and came home to India a few years ago, I thought, to die, but life had another chapter or two or three in mind for me. Even as I struggled with lack of vision and the inability to communicate with clarity, I found in my iPhone the ability to type and click photos. This became my fourth book, a compilation of 75 essays and photos that connected me to places and my mindset at that moment in time. This book also gave me confidence to take on writing my Slice of Life column, first for the India Today group, and now for The Indian Express. Through writing, I found myself connecting more with people on social media and taking on social causes that needed oxygen. My voice became the voice of those marginalised and othered. And today, I am happy cooking and mentoring chefs, modelling for brands I love, and teaching wherever I am asked to come, share and learn.

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What I have learned through the 50-year journey thus far of my ordinary life is something remarkable yet very easy. Life has shown me that what most satisfies me comes from within me, and without much fuss or muss. That awards and accolades, beauty and muscular bodies – these come and go, can be taken away and easily lost. What is enduring is our innate character and what makes us happiest is being authentic to ourselves. When asked if I have anything truly important to teach another, I speak not as a chef, but as a human, and I simply urge people to live life with eyes wide open and to embrace every opportunity that comes their way.

The promise I made to myself of going to medical school hasn’t been kept, but I don’t find myself lamenting that failure. My cooking, that is at once healthy and nutritive, is medicine that heals minds and bodies.

My dreams of performing and making music my profession died when I moved to America and developed asthma, and died again when I had my concussions and my speech changed. But now I sing for my family and friends. It costs me nothing, and my ego doesn’t fight me to rob them of a pleasure that also pleases my soul. I still take lessons, off and on, from Marina Ahmad, the guru I gravitated to in Manhattan 30 years ago. And the devotional songs that my grand-aunt sang come alive when my mind searches for a song to bring me comfort in trying times or when melancholy has me in its grip.

Also by Suvir Saran | What happens when we make peace with ourselves, our present and our past

Ragas and their nuanced connection to moods and emotions have happily seen me through to the other side of fifty. At 51, I cannot say I have done what I set out to do as I graduated from school and college, but I do feel soulfully satisfied and comfortably happy. It is a happiness that brings tears to my eyes as I reflect upon what I had once wanted and didn’t get, and what I got, which wasn’t even on my radar as a remote possibility when I was a young man. I look in the mirror and am mostly comfortable with the man looking back at me.

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When we live connected to our mind, body and soul, when we find answers from within and don’t follow fads and trends – it is then that we live lives that we are meant to. No matter how small it might seem, or how out there, or how outlandish – when we become one with the pulse of the planet and where it is taking us, it is then and only then that our strongest dreams come true.