I was born in Mumbai, when it was still called Bombay, in a family of high achievers. My dad is a civil engineer, my mother is one of India's best known journalists and my brother is a surgeon.

My childhood was spent with my grandmother (who was a great and passionate cook), with many aunts (who spent each afternoon cooking up goodies for when we came home from school) and of course with my mother (who introduced us to world cuisines at an early age and whose high profile career meant that we often took tea with people such as musician Pandit Ravi Shankar or the President of India). It was a charmed life!

I grew up learning Indian classical dance, traditional Indian beauty secrets and good traditional cooking and developed a great passion for the vibrancy and diversity of my country.

I completed a 3 year professional diploma in Hotel Management, Catering Technology and Applied Nutrition from the Hotel Management Institute in Bombay, considered the finest of its kind in India. Here I qualified as a chef and my love for cooking was polished to a fine art! Later I did a BA in Ancient Indian History, Politics and Economics. A diploma in natural beauty therapy followed.

I then moved to London where I also got a diploma in Journalism. Meanwhile my training in Indian dance continued and along with everything else, I also became a professional performer. If you will like to read more about my dance career click here.

I set up my first home in England when I was 22. I tried out countless recipes in order to replicate what had come out of my mother's kitchen in Bombay. I tried new methods, ingredients and combinations until I taught myself a style that I was comfortable with. Although I was a qualified chef, I needed to find a way to pare down the fuss and bother of traditional Indian cooking.

Today, what I cook is quite straightforward and I use the time saved to pursue some of my hobbies such as reading, travelling and restoring Indian antiques.

I started writing professionally at the age of fifteen when I wrote a weekly column on teenage issues such as relationships, education and style for a leading newspaper called 'The Evening Standard'.

Early on in my cooking career, I worked as a food consultant to the Times of India group of newspapers where I was responsible for the catering of the executive dining suite where national and international celebrities were entertained.

Later I worked for a couple of years at the Bombay Brasserie in London where I was involved with party bookings and customer relations.

Needless to say, in my dance career, I have performed Indian dance shows as a soloist and as a part of a company (Shobana Jeyasingh and my own Monisha Bharadwaj Danceworks) in many international festivals including Dance Umbrella (UK) Festival de Lille (France) and Du Maurier World Stage Festival (Toronto).

I have won dance awards too, a prominent one being the 'Time Out London Dance and Performance Award' for my choreography of a Bollywood type musical.