Michelin-star chef Vikas Khanna has taken a break from both culinary and filmmaking to shift his focus on his social duties. Khanna says that he is so occupied with food distribution that he has no time to even think about the release of his directorial debut, The Last Color starring Neena Gupta.
Recently, during an interview with BBC, Khanna was talking about initiative when the anchor suggested that the chef understands hunger better as he does not come from a rich family. The BBC anchor suggested that the motivation behind his social service stemmed from his sense of hunger during his time in India. To which, the chef gave a perfect reply, which is now being lauded by netizens.
In the video, the anchor asks Khanna, "You’ve cooked for the Obamas, you’ve been on the TV show with Gordon Ramsay. But it wasn’t always that way, was it? You’re not from a rich family. So, I dare say, you understand how precarious it can be in India."
To which Khanna humbly replied, "I understand, but my sense of hunger didn’t come from India so much because I was born and raised in Amritsar. We have a huge community kitchen where everyone gets fed. The entire city can feed there. But my sense of hunger came from New York when I was struggling here from the very bottom."
Talking about his mass food distribution initiative, the chef told IANS, "It started from a spam e-mail. On April 1, I saw an e-mail that said, 'after lockdown in India, there are old age homes and all they need is your attention'. I deleted that mail. But sometimes it happens that you board a wrong train but it leaves you at the right destination, and that's what happened with me in this case".
"It was a spam e-mail but the pictures in the e-mail, where old people were lying down without food, broke my heart because I have earlier worked with old age homes and leprosy centres and I knew that they generally have storage of food. Then I tweeted about the issue to check whether it was true or not and after that, we got hundreds of e-mails. We didn't know people paid attention to our tweets but I started getting messages from various places including Goa and Karnataka," he continued,
Talking about his film, the 48-year-old chef said, "Honestly, I don't have time to breath because of this whole situation. So, as of now I am not even thinking about the release of my film."
